Who made the first map?

Imagine how hard it would be to tell in words the exact location of all the streets and buildings in your town. It would be simpler to make a picture or diagram of the location of such objects. The result would be a map!
The first map we have record of was modeled in clay and then baked more than 4,000 years ago, in Egypt. In ancient times, landowners marked the outlines of their land, and kings, the boundaries of their kingdom on maps. But when people tried to show on maps the location of faraway places, they ran into problems.
This was because the earth is round and it is difficult to measure large distances accurately. Astronomers were a great help to early map-makers, because their studies had to do with the size and shape of the earth.
A Greek called Eratosthenes, who was born in 276 B.C., figured the distance around the earth and came every close to the truth. His methods made it possible for the first time to calculate north-south distances correctly. About the same time, Hipparchus suggested that a map of the world be divided evenly by imaginary lines of latitude, or parallels, and of longitude, or meridians. The proper positions of thses lines, he said, should be based on knowledge gainedfrom study of the heavens.
Ptolemy, in the 2nd century A.D., used the same idea and made an improved map with evenly spaced lines of latitude and longitude. His book on geography was the standard text until after the discovery of America. The discoveries of Columbus and others greatly increased interest in maps and charts. The first large collection of maps was published by Abraham Ortelius of Antwerp in 1570. Geradus Mercator bacame the father of modern map-making. He made a map on which all the curved lines on a globe were straight ones on a map. This enabled the map to show a straight line between two places which would give a true course by the compass. This kind of map is known as "a projection"; it "projects" or transfers the earth's surface onto that of a map.
On the title page of his book there was a drawing of the giant Atlas, and this is why a collection of maps has come to be known as an "atlas"!
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