A 6th century B.C. Babylonian clay tablet in the British Museum is the oldest surviving map of the world. It was discovered in Sippar, modern-day southern Iraq, and the world it maps has the Euphrates running down the center with Babylon straddling it. Other Mesopotamian kingdoms, cities and geographical areas are marked, including Assyria, Urartu and the southern marshes at the head of the Persian Gulf. We know it’s a map of the world instead of a local one because it is encircled by a ring labeled the Bitter River, a body of water that in Babylonian cosmology surrounded the known world.
Above the map is a paragraph of cuneiform writing that tells the Babylonian story of creation and describes its human, animal, monstrous and divine inhabitants. It doesn’t directly explain the map itself, however. The much longer inscription on the back does addresses that, although the damaged areas of the tablet make all the text incomplete.
There are eight “nagu” (regions) outlying the double ring of the Bitter River. They are shaped as triangles and may represent mountains like the ones that emerged after the waters of the Great Flood subsided. The reverse side of the tablet is inscribed with eight clearly divided paragraphs that describe the eight nagu as well as constellations. The cuneiform inscription on the back also notes that this map is a copy of a much older version. References to place names indicate that original map cannot have been made before the 9th century B.C.
British Museum scholars have been working on deciphering it ever since it was discovered in 1882, but the missing areas made it challenging. In the 1990s, Edith Horsley, a student in one of curator Dr. Irving Finkel’s night classes came across an interesting clay fragment while volunteering for the museum. She set it aside for Finkel to examine, and as soon as he saw it, he realized it fit into one of the broken gaps in the world map tablet. That fragment proved to be a keystone to figuring out important elements of the map, including the final location of the ark built by Utnapishtim, the Babylonian version of Noah.
Dr. Irving Finkel has made one of his pricelessly entertaining videos about the map, its history, its decipherment and significance. Spoiler: the description on YouTube has the greatest content warning of all time.
Frankly, I am not so sure if I got the bit about the ‘Bitter River’ right, and also I’d rather presume that the map is, at least in its origin, probably older than the the 6th century BC.
In the 5th century BC, Herodotus speculates about Africa (‘Libya’) and its characteristics, and he reports about an (attempted?) circumnavigation in the 7th century BC:
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4.42. “I wonder then at those who have parted off and divided the world into Libya, Asia, and Europe, since the difference between these is not small; for in length Europe extends along by both, while in breadth it is apparently beyond comparison larger; for Libya furnishes proof about itself that it is surrounded by sea, except so much of it as borders upon Asia.
This fact was first of all shown by Necos king of the Egyptians [Pharaoh Necho II] as far we have knowledge. When he had ceased digging the channel which goes from the Nile to the Arabian gulf [Canal of the Pharaohs, Red Sea], he sent Phoenicians with ships, bidding them sail and come back through the Pillars of Heracles to the Northern Sea [Mediterranean Sea] and so back to Egypt.
The Phoenicians therefore set forth from the Erythrean Sea and sailed through the Southern Sea; and when autumn came, they would put to shore and sow the land, wherever in Libya they might happen to be as they sailed, and then they waited for the harvest: and having reaped the corn they would sail on, so that after two years had elapsed, in the third year they turned through the Pillars of Heracles and arrived again in Egypt. And they reported a thing which I cannot believe, but another man may, namely that in sailing round Libya they had the sun on their right.”
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