Cartography

A farmer at Mezhirich, a village (selo) in central Ukraine, will dig up the lower jawbone of a mammoth in 1965 while in the process of expanding his cellar.

Further excavations will reveal the presence of four huts, made up of a total of one hundred and forty-nine mammoth bones.

These dwellings, dating back some fifteen thousand years, will be determined to have been some of the oldest shelters known to have been constructed by prehistoric man, usually attributed to Early European Modern Humans.

Also found on the site were a map inscribed onto a bone, presumably showing the area around the settlement; the remains of a "drum", made of a mammoth skull painted with a pattern of red ocher dots and lines; and amber ornaments and fossil shells.

Heads of animals, especially of cattle, are mounted on walls of Çatalhöyük.

A painting of the village with the twin mountain peaks of Hasan Dag in the background is frequently cited as the world's oldest map and the first landscape painting, although some archaeologists question this interpretation of the artifact.

Stephanie Meece, for example, argues that it is more likely a painting of a leopard skin instead of a volcano, and a decorative geometric design instead of a map.

All rooms were kept scrupulously clean.

Archaeologists identified very little trash or rubbish within the buildings, but found that trash heaps outside the ruins contain sewage and food waste as well as significant amounts of wood ash.

In good weather, many daily activities might also have taken place on the rooftops, which conceivably form an open-air plaza.

Houses in Çatalhöyük are clustered together and are entered via flat roofs.

Therefore, it is normal for the inhabitants to view their city from a bird's eye view.

Later civilizations would follow the same convention; today, almost all maps are drawn as if we are looking down from the sky instead of from a horizontal or oblique perspective.

The logical advantage of such a perspective is that it provides a view of a greater area, conceptually.

A map of a river valley between two hills is shown on a 7.6 centimeter by 6.8 centimeter clay tablet found in 1930 at Ga-Sur, near contemporary Kirkuk.

Most scholars date the tablet to the twenty-fifth to twenty-fourth century BCE.

Cuneiform inscriptions label the features on the map, including a plot of land described as three hundred and fifty-four iku (twelve hectares) that was owned by a person called Azala.

Egyptians produce maps showing boundaries of property for use in taxation beginning about the fourteenth century BCE.

The annual flooding of the Nile River, which obliterates property markers, necessitates such maps.

Thales’ pupil Anaximander challenges Thales' position that a single element can be the origin of all.

He argues that, because known elements are constantly opposing and changing into one another, something different from these elements must therefore underlie, and cause, changes, postulating the apeiron "boundless or "indefinite" as the original and sustaining substance.

Believing Earth to be cylindrically shaped, Anaximander produces the first map of the known world and speculates about the origins of marine life.

Thales of Miletus, who has made detailed observations on triangulation navigation methods, dies holding the belief that the Earth floats on water; that all things come to be from water; and that all things somehow consist of water.

Thales’ pupil and successor Anaximander of Miletus, who wrote a comprehensive history of the universe that hypothesizes nonmythological explanations for the creation, dies only a year after his teacher.

Challenging Thales' position that a single element can be the origin of all, Anaximander argued that, because known elements are constantly opposing and changing into one another, something different from these elements must therefore underlie and cause changes, postulating the “apeiron” ("boundless," or "indefinite") as the originative and sustaining substance.

Anaximander, believing Earth to be cylindrically shaped, drew the first known world map; he also speculated about the origins of marine life.

Greek philosopher Anaximenes, the last of the Milesian school founded by Thales, maintains that the primary substance is air (Greek, “aer”); everything else in the world, including the gods, is no more than condensed or rarefied air: condensation transforms air into wind, water and earth; rarefaction heats air and transforms it into fire, in this way explaining the sun and other celestial bodies.

A large town thrives in about 500 BCE at Wusail, some twenty kilometers north of present Doha (also seen as Ad Dawhah).

The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the early fifth century BCE, refers to the seafaring Canaanites as the original inhabitants of Qatar.

The influential Greek geographer Ptolemy, active in second century CE in Alexandria, shows in his map of the Arab world a town that scholars believe to be a forerunner to the present Qatari town of Zubarah.

Hipparchus of Rhodes, a working astronomer at least from 147 BCE, compiles the first (known) star catalog; it contains approximately eight hundred and fifty entries.

Hipparchus also develops a location system of lines on the surface of the Earth (the forerunners of latitude and longitude).

Relatively little of Hipparchus' direct work survives.

Although he writes at least fourteen books, only his commentary on the popular astronomical poem by Aratus will be preserved by later copyists.

Most of what is known about Hipparchus comes from Strabo's Geographia ("Geography"), and from Pliny the Elder's Naturalis historia ("Natural history"), both written in the first century, and from Ptolemy's Almagest, compiled in the second century, with additional references to him by the fourth-century writers Pappus of Alexandria and Theon of Alexandria in their commentaries on the Almagest.

Claudius Ptolemy, apparently completing his astronomical observations in 141, produces the Geography, an effort to map the known world.

Drawing on the work of Hipparchus, Strabo, and Marinus of Tyre, Ptolemy lists latitudes and longitudes of important locations, with accompanying maps and a description of techniques of mapmaking.

The Jin court is forced to flee from Luoyang in 317 and reestablishes itself at Nanjing to the south.

The transfer of the capital coincides with China's political fragmentation into a succession of dynasties that is to last from 304 to 589.

During this period the process of sinicization accelerates among the non-Chinese arrivals in the north and among the aboriginal tribesmen in the south.

This process is also accompanied by the increasing popularity of Buddhism (introduced into China in the first century CE) in both north and south China.

Despite the political disunity of the times, there are notable technological advances.

The invention of gunpowder (at this time for use only in fireworks) and the wheelbarrow is believed to date from the sixth or seventh century.

Advances in medicine, astronomy, and cartography are also noted by historians.