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Tag: Maps

   

The beauty of maps

There’s a fascinating programme on BBC TV called The Beauty of Maps in celebration of ‘Magnificent Maps’ exhibition staring soon at the British Library in London.
It’s hard to underestimate the importance of maps in history. In fact the exhibition also has the title of ‘Power Propaganda and Art’, which shows their real significance.
Nowadays its easy to know where you are – SatNav, Google Maps and specialist maps galore – it is hard to get really lost almost wherever you are, and its impossible to imagine a world without maps.
As a pictorial representation of the world that we live in, maps were probably the earliest pictures that humans drew, but as people started to leave their own surroundings and travel around and then to other countries they needed some more accurate.
So maps making started to develop. First people had to understand the size of countries and places. When maps first started being drawn it was common for important places to be bigger in proportion to their size; often in the centre of the known world!
But people didn’t understand where they were in the world or the scale involved in distances. It was only when cartography became a science and mathematics could accurately measure and represent size accurately, that maps really started to mean something.

 

Posted on May 14 2010 by Nigel Haines in Society | Read More | Comments [1]