Ancient Concepts of the Known World

Ancient civilizations across the world consistently conceptualized geography in terms of a bounded, more or less well-understood "known world," variously called the oikoumene by the Greeks, orbis terrarum by the Romans, or tianxia ("all under heaven") in the Chinese tradition, surrounded by increasingly vague, often mythologized, and sometimes explicitly monstrous or supernatural unknown lands at its margins. The Babylonian Imago Mundi, a clay tablet (dated to roughly the 6th century BCE, though possibly copying an earlier original) now held in the British Museum, presents perhaps the oldest surviving world map: it depicts Babylon at the center of a disk-shaped world, encircled by a "Bitter River" (marratu), beyond which lie eight triangular regions described in accompanying cuneiform text as remote lands inhabited by mythical beasts and heroes, including a region where "the sun is not seen" — an explicit cartographic embodiment of the known-world-surrounded-by-mythic-periphery pattern.