Cartography
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Cartography is the study and practice of making and using maps. Combining science, aesthetics and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.
Valcamonica rock art (I), Paspardo r. 29, topographic composition, 4th millennium BCE
The Tabula Rogeriana, drawn by Muhammad al-Idrisi for Roger II of Sicily in 1154. South is at the top.
Europa regina in Sebastian Münster's "Cosmographia", 1570
A pre-Mercator nautical chart of 1571, from Portuguese cartographer Fernão Vaz Dourado (c. 1520 – c. 1580). It belongs to the so-called plane chart model, where observed latitudes and magnetic directions are plotted directly into the plane, with a constant scale, as if the Earth were a plane (Portuguese National Archives of Torre do Tombo, Lisbon).
Medieval Islamic geography and cartography refer to the study of geography and cartography in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age. Muslim scholars made advances to the map-making traditions of earlier cultures, particularly the Hellenistic geographers Ptolemy and Marinus of Tyre, combined with what explorers and merchants learned in their travels across the Old World (Afro-Eurasia). Islamic geography had three major fields: exploration and navigation, physical geography, and cartography and mathematical geography. Islamic geography reached its apex with Muhammad al-Idrisi in the 12th century.
Ibn al-Wardi's atlas of the world (14th century), a manuscript copied in the 17th century