A map is a representation of an area, usually drawn to scale and usually on a flat surface. It may show physical features, such as mountains, rivers, and lakes, or man-made features such as roads, railways, canals, and buildings. Maps may also show boundaries between countries or states, administrative divisions of a country or state (such as provinces), or different levels of government (such as counties).
Some maps show natural resources that are important to the economy of an area, such as forests, mineral deposits, or agricultural land. Other maps show the distribution of economic activity in an area, such as manufacturing or retailing. Still others show the pattern of settlement in an area over time.
The first known map was made by the Babylonians about 4000 BC. It was a clay tablet with lines that represented the Euphrates River and its tributaries. The Greeks were the first to use paper maps about 500 BC. By 200 BC they had developed mathematical methods for representing geographical features on a plane surface. This allowed them to make more accurate maps than had been possible before.
In ancient Rome , roads were marked out on stone tablets called “milestones” which gave distances from Rome . In medieval Europe , travelers used “itineraries” which were lists of towns with the distances between them. These were often inaccurate because they did not take into account changes in route due to rivers that had dried up or new roads that had been built since the itinerary was made.
The first modern road map was published in London in 1584 by Ralph Agas . It showed all the streets in London . In 1608 Hondius published a map of England and Wales which included roads for the first time. John Ogilby began publishing road maps of Britain in 1675 . He pioneered the use of straight lines instead of winding paths to represent roads on his maps; this made them much easier to read than earlier ones . From about 1750 onwards Ordnance Survey began producing detailed large-scale surveys which accurately mapped all parts of Great Britain at 6 inches ( 1:105600) to 1 inch ( 1:63360) scales . Since then many other countries have produced similar mapping surveys at various scales including Australia , Canada , India , New Zealand , South Africa and USA .