Babylonian Map

I think maps are really interesting, and often I think the older ones are the best. This is a picture of the very oldest known map of the world, and it comes from the ancient Babylonian civilization (700-500 BCE).

Maps are by nature symbolic representations, and so looking at how the cartographer imagined the space and what they elected to display as important information tells us a lot about their culture.

This clay tablet has some wording on it in cuneiform (zoom in to see it and be glad you are not an Ancient Babylonian), but most obviously has a double-ringed circle enclosing some sets of parallel lines. Triangles adorn the outer rings, and circles appear within.

Ancient maps didn’t approximate space with proportionate measuring, but they did have relative arrangements of various features. In this case, the city of Babylon features prominently as a rectangle at the right end of the Euphrates River, which appears as vertical parallel lines. The smaller circles represent other cities, obviously less important. The encircling ring is labelled “Bitter River,” and to my mind this is where things get especially interesting.

There are several elements to this map that suggest not merely physical places, but ones that have a symbolic importance that might mean “far away” or amidst the wilderness/other/spiritual world. For instance, does the Bitter River refer to an actual body of water, or to a cosmic separation? Do the triangles translate into mountain regions, or vistas outside of the control of urban cultures? They are each labeled with the term six (or seven) “nagu”. A nagu is a unit of measurement that can refer to time or linear space — so do we interpret the nagu as time it might take to get from one to the other, or a physical distance?

Whether or not we figure out the etchings on this map correctly, the cartographer was being quite intentional. The distance from the minds of this culture to our own is as misty as our understanding of this first map.