Maps, whether paper or electronic, are familiar to us. In the city map, we can see which street to go to the cinema, and in the world map, we can also know which direction to turn from Shanghai to Madagascar.
Don't forget that the production of these maps relies on technology such as satellite mapping. In earlier ancient times, it was difficult for people to stand on a high place to see the whole city, let alone use artificial satellites high to Earth orbit to open God's perspective to draw a map of the world. So, how exactly did the ancients draw maps?
Ancient Drawing Maps: Hold on to 3 elements
The earliest maps date back thousands of years, buried deep in the Mesopotamian plains, and unearthed decades later, the maps on the stone slabs are still clearly visible. The clay tablet below is a map of ancient Babylon and a distillation of the map information in it.
Ancient Babylonian world map from 700 BC to 500 BC丨Wikipedia
Map restoration map丨Wikipedia
The 1 in the picture above refers to a mountain, the circle of 14, 15, 16, and 17 refers to the ocean, 7 is a swamp, 9 is a canal, 13 in the center of the picture is Babylon, and the other dots are other cities around it. It's too rudimentary to look at, right? But this information was also enough for the ancients, who could know which city to go in which direction, how far from the mountain, which cities were on the other side of the river, and so on.
So how is this map made?
Let's do a simple experiment. Think of the phone's screen as a piece of land, where we stand in the lower left corner of the phone. Now I tell you to go find a treasure: first go 45 degrees to the upper right until the right edge of the phone; Then walk up the right edge two centimeters to get there. I believe that everyone can basically find it quickly, and students who cannot find it please get the protractor and ruler by themselves.
This experiment involves direction, distance, and route, which is actually the core of the map, which was true in ancient times and is still the case. You see, as long as you have these 3 elements, satellite mapping is not necessarily required to make a map, and a slight loss of geometry knowledge is enough.
Draw the map
In the early process of map making in the East and the West, the basic idea was the same.
How to do the direction? Distinguished by compass, sinan, celestial orientation, tree rings, branch and leaf growth, etc.;
What about distance? You can count how many turns the wheels of the carriage turned, and then multiply by the circumference of the wheels, ancient China also invented a device called the jili drum car, which can record the mileage traveled through a set of gear systems inside, and calling it a taxi is not a big problem.
Remember the drum car丨Wikipedia
If you hike, count the steps, and if the distance is too far, drive a stake or milestone every few huali (1 huali is 500 meters).
As for the route, it is the result of combining direction and route.
This kind of map that relies purely on manpower (sometimes supplemented by horsepower), as long as you are willing to work hard and measure carefully, you can get a relatively fine map. For example, the map of the early Western Han Dynasty unearthed from the Mawangdui Han tomb below shows quite accurate information such as cities, garrison locations, rivers, lakes, roads, and mountains. The same ancient map, if the ancient Babylon map is a vector map, this can be said to be a 4K ultra-clear TV.
Mawangdui Han tomb out of the land map丨Hunan Provincial Museum
Make larger maps
The ancient maps mentioned above are all depicted in local areas. What if the ancients needed larger maps? Get a lot of people together, draw maps of different areas at the same scale, and put them together. It's simple, but it's also crude.
The picture below is a map of the Northern Song Dynasty. The coastline of China in the map is not small different from the current map, there are reasons for the backwardness of surveying and mapping technology, and there are reasons for the coastline to change over time, but the main reason is because the earth is a sphere, and the earth's surface has appeared in a significant arc within the area covered by the map of thousands of kilometers. Think of the orange peel wrapped in orange pulp, which was originally spherical and would fall apart once peeled off and flattened.
Rubbing of the Northern Song Dynasty "Yujitu" stele hidden in the Forest of Steles in Xi'an丨Reference[1]
Without the guidance of map projection theory, maps would have this kind of deformation, so even in the Ming and Qing dynasties, ancient Chinese maps still seem to be at the same level as the maps unearthed from the Mawangdui Han tomb, without a qualitative breakthrough.
On the other side of the globe, Europeans began to realize that the earth was spherical. Ancient scientists represented by Ptolemy not only set out to calculate the radius and circumference of the earth (this is a long but interesting story, dig a hole, have the opportunity to tell again), but also began to use latitude and longitude to determine coordinates, although the idea is still very primitive, but also laid the foundation for the later Western Age of Exploration.
In the 14th century, the large-scale use of the compass and sextant allowed navigators to determine their position in the vast sea without the surface, making ocean routes possible.
With latitude and longitude, coupled with the use of sextants, crew members can determine their position by observing celestial bodies丨Wikipedia
After that, the biggest difference between Eastern and Western maps was that Western maps had appeared graticules.
The meridian measures the east-west direction. People drew a line from the North Pole to the South Pole, passing through the Greenwich Observatory in England, as the 0-degree meridian, that is, the prime meridian. Taking this line as a reference, 180 degrees to the east is called east longitude, and 180 degrees to the west is west longitude.
The parallels measure the north-south position. With the equator as a natural starting point, 90 degrees north is called north latitude, and 90 degrees south is called south latitude.
In this way, points on any plane on the earth can be represented by a set of latitude and longitude. With the help of this system, the map became more accurate and refined, reaching the peak of the pre-space era.
An antique map from the 19th century period hung by a seller with a clear grid of latitude and longitude on it
Later, the traditional cartography map was finally replaced by artificial satellites. During the Cold War, both camps wanted to detect each other's reality, and spy satellites came into being. On February 28, 1959, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, a spy satellite in human history entered space. People combined satellite photos with maps, and the first satellite map in history was born. Since then, satellite photos have become more and more high-resolution and cheaper, and we ordinary people can now use our own computers or phablets at home to overlook the earth like God.
References: [1] Narrative Peng, "The Splendor of Ancient Chinese Maps," National Geographic of China, No. 8, 2001
Author: Woo Meow King Wen He; Editor: Li Xiaokui