A list of the most popular browsers can be found below. Why do maps always show the north as up? The McArthur map also makes us wonder why we are so quick to assume that Northern Europeans were the ones who invented the modern map — and decided which way to hold it — in the first place. There is nothing inevitable or intrinsically correct — not in geographic, cartographic or even philosophical terms — about the north being represented as up, because up on a map is a human construction, not a natural one.
And there was a long stretch in the medieval era when most European maps were drawn with the east on the top. Things changed with the age of exploration.
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It began in the Mediterranean, somewhere between Europe and the Arab world. These men, who formed the Majorcan Cartographic School, also established a number of other crucial mapping conventions of the era, including coloring in the Red Sea bright red and drawing the Alps as a giant chicken foot. But this is only part of the explanation. Indeed, the Chinese supposedly referred to their first compass magnets as south-pointing stones.
Crucially, the Chinese developed this convention before they began to use compasses for navigation at sea.
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By the time Europeans adopted the compass, though, they were already experienced in navigating with reference to the North Star, the one point in the heavens that remains fixed anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Many mariners saw the compass as an artificial replacement for the star on cloudy nights and even assumed it was the pull of the star itself that drew the needle north. Yet even as this north-pointing compass became essential to navigation and navigational charts in the 15th century, less precise land maps showing the entire known Old World continued to offer a disorienting array of perspectives.
In fact, the first blow to this pious assumption came with the discovery of just how much of the Old World lies to the east of Jerusalem.
How the north ended up on top of the map | Al Jazeera America
Only later did it become apparent just how far north of the equator Jerusalem — and by extension, Italy — really was. Ptolemy was a Hellenic cartographer from Egypt whose work in the second century A. For reasons that have been lost to history, Ptolemy put the north up. On the one hand, Ptolemy realized that, sitting in Alexandria, he was in the northern half of a very large globe, whose size had been fairly accurately calculated by the ancient Greeks.
On the other hand, it put Alexandria at the very bottom of the inhabited world as known to Ptolemy and all the main civilizational centers in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Even if compasses and Ptolemy had both pointed to the south, northerners could still have come along and flipped things around. The politics of reorientation are anything but simple.
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Nepal, of course, gets a bit cut off on the sides, but that is nothing compared with what happens to Nebraska. Don't have a Kindle?
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