Why were the Romans so terrible at making maps? Pic related.

A better question would be "how were ancient people so gifted at making maps?"

I look at maps of the americas from 1600 or so and wonder how they surveyed so accurately.

>>63933
There's no way that type is from 40bc.

>>64144
Its a reconstruction of an actual map

>>63933
I'd say it's amazing, especially for the time. Would take some pretty skilled workers to create a map so accurate

>>64239

Before the invention of accurate clocks, was there any way to determine longitude other than direct measurement?

>>63933
truly, England is land of the angles

>>63933
Maps are actually very hard to create. We just have the advantage of thousands of years of people collectively making maps so of course what the Romans created seems absurdly wrong to us.

>>63933
I like how the Arab Gulf is a face. But honestly, this is amazing to me. They had nothing but their eyes for this, right? Have you tried walking along a coast-line for a few weeks and then drawing that shit accurately?

Pretty impressive I'd say. They have little sense of scale when you start getting away from the Med', but for the most part it's better than I would have thought they'd have.

>>63933
They thought Scandinavia was an island, but they wouldn't bother sailing around it to verify it. So it's probably more of an issue about relevant trading routes than exploration for the sake of exploration.

File: 1052px-Hecataeus_world_map-en.svg.png (269KB, 1052x1024px) Image search: [Google]

269KB, 1052x1024px

This one is from around 500 BC and is a lot better.

>>64256
I think that's one of the suggested purposes of the Antikythera mechanism

>>64368
cool story fag, post the original one

>>64385
I'm fairly sure it was made for knowing positions planets and not for position on Earth.

>>64404
fair enough, I've not looked at it in any depth really. Happy to be wrong here

>>64394
Lad, this is just a reconstruction because the original is 2500 years old and pretty much unreadable. Nothing was changed to the map.

>>64404
Yup, it was for navigation by sailors who used stellar positions to guide themselves around.

Okay, you draw a map just by looking at a coastline, no compass, no map to guide you, you just get to look at the coastline and draw what you see.

File: World_Map_1799.jpg (1MB, 3456x1931px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 3456x1931px

1799 map.

Bretty good, but you can still see how obvious mistakes: no Tasmania, they don't know the details of the high Canadian Arctic and northern Greenland, no Vancouver Island, they have the Gulf of California going way too far north and Baja much too wide, African Great Lakes are missing, Japan is all wrong...

>>64710
...and they seem to have no idea about Antarctica

>>64710
>pretty good
It's really good mate
It's missing odd details but it's pretty much on the money

>>63933
Young boy cum in their eyes

>>64728
>southern icy ocean, Antarctic or south pole

>>64787
I would call that an educated guess based on what they knew about the northern equivalent, since in reality it's a continental land mass.

>>64856
they knew it was there though. They just didn't know it was a landmass and assumed it was an ice shelf like the Arctic