ANCIENT CARTOGRAPHY:
Mystery of the World’s Oldest Map on a Nearly 3,000-year-old Babylonian Tablet Finally Solved ( Leman Altuntaş, Arkeonews).
A recent British Museum video reveals that the “oldest map of the world in the world” on a clay tablet from Babylon was deciphered to reveal a surprisingly familiar story.
The oldest globe ever found is the Imago Mundi, a Babylonian map of the world. This map is a Babylonian clay tablet with a schematic world map and two inscriptions written in the Akkadian language. The probably seventh century BC is when this map was created. It shows a small part of the world as the ancient Babylonians knew it, and it was found in the southern Iraqi city of Abu Habba (Sippar).
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One point of interest is that the map claims to tell the location of the Flood Ark.
Aside from mapping out what they thought existed outside of their world, the Babylonian scribe also included references to a well-known story (basically the Babylonian version of the biblical story of Noah’s Ark) and mythical animals and lands.
The ancient Babylonians thought that the remains of the enormous ark that their version of Noah, named Utnapishtim, had constructed in 1800 BC at God’s command were located on the backside of a mountain, the same mountain that the Bible says Noah’s Ark crashed on, beyond the bitter river.
The article links to a Youtube video on the map, narrated by Irving Finkel, who, as usual, is in top form.
The story of the finding of the crucial missing piece of the map is not quite as good as the one about George Adam Smith going back to Iraq and finding a tablet (actually of the Atrahasis Epic) which filled in the missing part of his Gilgamesh Flood story fragment. But it's impressive anyway.
For the Babylonian Ark tablet, to which Dr, Finkel refers in the video and which he also published, see here and links.
Please do not try to use this map to find the Ark. It does not give precise coordinates!
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