History and types of maps

History of map-making:

• The oldest map found is a clay tablet from Mesopotamia, about 2,500 BC. Ptolemy's map of the world is a famous early map.
• Greek and Arab geographers laid the foundation of modern cartography: they measured the earth's circumference and used geographical coordinates.
• In the early modern period, maps were drawn on different projections to get true directions, distances and areas; aerial photography helped map-making in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In India:

• The foundation goes back to the Vedic period, with astronomical ideas set out as 'siddhantas' in the works of Aryabhata, Varahamihira and Bhaskara. Ancient scholars divided the known world into seven 'dwipas'.
• Todarmal made land surveying and mapping part of revenue collection; Sher Shah Suri's revenue maps added to the methods.
• The Survey of India was set up in 1767, leading to the map of Hindustan in 1785. Today it maps the whole country at different scales.

Types of maps by scale:

• Large-scale maps show small areas in detail.

• Cadastral maps (from the French 'cadastre', a register of property) show ownership of land: field boundaries and house plans, for revenue and records. Village maps are at 1:4,000, city plans at 1:2,000 or larger. (The teacher compares them to the village land-record map with each plot's number.)

• Topographical maps, made by national mapping agencies in series; the Survey of India uses 1:250,000, 1:50,000 and 1:25,000. They use uniform colours and symbols for relief, drainage, farmland, forest, settlements and services.

• Small-scale maps show large areas with less detail: wall maps (smaller scale than topographical maps, larger than atlas maps) and atlas maps (very small scale, a 'graphic encyclopaedia').

Types of maps by function:

• Physical maps show natural features: relief maps (mountains, valleys, plains, plateaus), geological maps (rocks and structures), climatic maps (temperature, rainfall, winds) and soil maps.
• Cultural maps show man-made features: political maps (country, state, district boundaries), population maps (distribution, density, growth, age and sex), economic maps (crops, minerals, industries, trade routes) and transportation maps (roads, railways, stations, airports).
• The book's examples all show Nagpur district: relief and slope, rocks and minerals, climate, soils, population, land use and industries.

Example (new): a map of one housing colony showing every plot and its owner is a large-scale cadastral map; a map of all of Asia's rivers on one page of an atlas is a small-scale physical map.