Cartography

The Nuzi / Ga-Sur tablet: watercourse, hills, settlements, labelled districts, cardinal directions. The Nippur plan, c. 1500 BCE, is accepted without dissent. The Çatalhöyük mural (c. 6600 BCE) is no longer the mainstream reading — Meece 2006 reads the volcano as a leopard skin and the grid as a standard repeated wall motif.

Cartography (/kɑːrˈtɒɡrəfi/) is the study and practice of making and using maps. Combining science, aesthetics and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality (or an imagined reality) can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.

The fundamental objectives of traditional cartography are to:

    Set the map's agenda and select traits of the object to be mapped. This is the concern of map editing. Traits may be physical, such as roads or land masses, or may be abstract, such as toponyms or political boundaries.
    Represent the terrain of the mapped object on flat media. This is the concern of map projections.
    Eliminate the mapped object's characteristics that are irrelevant to the map's purpose. This is the concern of generalization.
    Reduce the complexity of the characteristics that will be mapped. This is also the concern of generalization.
    Orchestrate the elements of the map to best convey its message to its audience. This is the concern of map design.

Modern cartography constitutes many theoretical and practical foundations of geographic information systems (GIS) and geographic information science (GISc).