Babylonian Map of the World: The Oldest Known World Map

The Babylonian Map of the World is a small clay tablet, written around 600 BC, that shows the world as a flat disc with Babylon near its centre, surrounded by a ring of ocean called the “Bitter River”. Now in the British Museum, it is the oldest surviving attempt to map the entire known world. It combines real geography with myth, offering a rare glimpse of how ancient Mesopotamians pictured the edges of the earth.

Discovery and date

The tablet entered the British Museum in 1882 and is registered as BM 92687. It is thought to come from Sippar, a city on the Euphrates about 60 km north of Babylon where many tablets were dug up in the late nineteenth century. It was first published in 1889.

Most scholars date the tablet to the Neo-Babylonian or a slightly later period, roughly the seventh to sixth centuries BC; the museum gives a range of about 700–500 BC. A colophon, or scribal note, says it was copied from an older original. The text mentions heroes such as Sargon of Akkad, who lived around 2300 BC, so the ideas it records may be much older than the tablet itself.

What the map shows

The map measures only about 12 by 8 cm. It was drawn on wet clay with a stylus, and a small hole in the centre suggests that the circles were scratched with a compass-like tool.

At the heart of the map is a rectangle labelled Babylon, cut by the Euphrates, which flows from mountains in the north to a marsh and channel in the south. Small circles mark places and peoples, including Assyria, Urartu in the Armenian highlands, the city of Der near the Iranian foothills, and Bit-Yakin, a Chaldean tribal land near the Gulf. The geography is schematic, not drawn to scale.

Two concentric circles surround the land. The band between them is labelled marratu, usually translated “Bitter River” or salt sea, the ocean believed to encircle the inhabited world.

The regions beyond the ocean

Triangles project outward from the ocean ring. These are the nagû, distant regions beyond the sea. Five survive; the text implies there were originally seven or eight. One damaged triangle was completed in 1995, when a small missing fragment was recognised in the British Museum’s collections.

The text describes these regions as places of wonder. One is a land where the sun is never seen; others hold strange animals or lie at distances given in leagues. The tablet also lists exotic creatures, and it names Utnapishtim, the survivor of the great flood in Mesopotamian myth, known from the Epic of Gilgamesh. The British Museum curator Irving Finkel has argued that one passage refers to the place where the flood hero’s boat came to rest, though the reading is debated.

Purpose and meaning

The map was not a navigation aid. No traveller could use it to find a road. Instead, it expressed a worldview in which Babylon, the city of the god Marduk, stood at the centre of creation, with the known kingdoms around it and the mythical fringes of the world beyond the ocean.

The idea of a disc of land surrounded by ocean was widespread in the ancient world. Early Greek thinkers pictured Okeanos as a river encircling the earth, an image that Herodotus later criticised as unfounded. The Babylonian tablet is the oldest surviving visual version of this idea.

The tablet also reflects the political world of its time. Assyria and Urartu, once powerful rivals of Babylon, appear simply as places on the disc, while Babylon alone is drawn as a large rectangle. For a Babylonian scribe, the map confirmed that his city was the natural centre of the world.

Myths and facts

• Myth: it is the oldest map ever made. Older Mesopotamian maps exist, such as the Nippur city plan of about 1500–1300 BC and estate maps on clay. What makes this tablet unique is its attempt to show the whole world.
• Myth: it is an accurate map. The positions of places are approximate and symbolic, and the outer regions are mythical.
• Fact: text and image belong together. The cuneiform text above the map and on the back explains the outer regions, so the tablet is as much a written description as a drawing.

Timeline

• c. 2300 BC: Sargon of Akkad, one of the figures named on the tablet, rules Mesopotamia.
• c. 1500–1300 BC: Clay plan of the city of Nippur, one of the oldest surviving town maps.
• c. 700–500 BC: The Babylonian Map of the World is written, probably in the 6th century BC.
• 1882: The tablet is acquired by the British Museum.
• 1889: The map is first published.
• 1995: A missing fragment of one outer triangle is identified.

Why it matters

The Babylonian Map of the World shows that people in the first millennium BC already tried to picture the world as a whole. Its mixture of real places and mythical lands reflects the knowledge of Babylonian scribes, a learned tradition that began with the invention of cuneiform writing and also produced the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries.