Ancient Babylonian and Egyptian Maps

The oldest known map of a specific geographic area is the so-called Nuzi map, an incised clay tablet from the Akkadian period, roughly 2300 BCE, discovered near the ancient site of Nuzi (Gasur) close to modern Kirkuk in northern Iraq and now held at Harvard's Semitic Museum. The tablet depicts a river valley flanked by mountains and settlements, with cuneiform labels identifying watercourses, a plot of land, and cardinal directions, though the drawing is schematic rather than drawn to consistent scale. Its likely purpose was administrative or legal, recording an estate or a boundary in a land dispute, which indicates that maps in early Mesopotamian society first served bureaucratic and property functions rather than exploration or navigation, in a scribal culture that already used standardized area units such as the iku for surveying and taxation.