How Did Humans Invent Maps?

How Did Humans Invent Maps? There is a clay tablet in the British Museum, inventory number ninety-two thousand six hundred eighty-seven, roughly the size of a human palm, cracked across one corner, fired in Babylonian clay sometime around six hundred BCE. Curators label it the earliest known world map. Tour groups photograph it and move on. What almost none of them notice — what the label does not explain — is that the tablet does not show the world. It shows Babylon. At the center. Surrounded by a circular ocean. Beyond the ocean, eight triangular territories labeled "distant regions" that no Babylonian had ever reached, and possibly did not exist. The map is not a record of what anyone saw. It is a statement about who mattered, rendered permanent in fired clay and presented as fact.