He was an astronomer and astrologer obsessed with making accurate horoscopes, which required precisely placing someone’s birth town on a world map. The first great attempt to make mapping realistic came in the second century A.D. It was more of a statement, an attempt to make Rome’s sprawl feel cohesive. Centuries later, the Romans drew an extensive map of their empire on a long scroll, but since the map was barely a foot high and dozens of feet wide, it couldn’t be realistic. Maps were more a form of artistic expression, or a way of declaring one’s fiefdom. Indeed, accuracy wasn’t a great concern of early map-drawers. “There was something almost talismanic, I think, about having the world in your hand,” says Jerry Brotton, a professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London who specializes in cartography.
It was more primordial: to help the map-holder grasp the idea of the whole world, with himself at the center. It doesn’t have much detail-a few regions are named, including Assyria-but it wasn’t really for navigation. in Mesopotamia, it depicts a circular Babylon at the center, bisected by the Euphrates River and surrounded by the ocean. A clay tablet created around 700 to 500 B.C.
One of the oldest surviving maps is, ironically, about the size and shape of an early iPhone: the Babylonian Map of the World. Three thousand years ago, our ancestors began a long experiment in figuring out how they fit into the world, by inventing a bold new tool: the map. Is it possible that today’s global positioning systems and smartphones are affecting our basic ability to navigate? Will technology alter forever how we get around? It’s how we know where we are in our neighborhoods, our cities, the world. Scientists since the 1940s have argued we normally possess an internal compass, “a map-like representation within the ‘black box’ of the nervous system,” as geographer Rob Kitchin puts it. Some observers worry that this represents a new and dangerous shift in our style of navigation. You can laugh, but many of us have stopped paying attention to the world around us because we are too intent on following directions. Amazingly, she just patiently followed the computer’s instructions, instead of relying on her own common sense, until she noticed the street signs were in Croatian. And in Europe, a 67-year-old Belgian woman was led remarkably astray by her GPS, turning what was supposed to be a 90-mile drive to Brussels into a daylong voyage into Germany and beyond.
In Manhattan, one man followed his GPS into a park, where his car got stuck on a staircase. She thankfully managed to climb out and swim to shore, as her bright red Yaris sank beneath the waves.Īccidents like this have become weirdly common. Indeed, she was so intent on following the device that she didn’t notice that her car was headed straight for Georgian Bay-so she drove down a boat launch and straight into the frigid water. It was unfamiliar territory for her, so she was dutifully following her GPS. Last spring, a 23-year-old woman was driving her car through the Ontario town of Tobermory.
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