Cafe of Broken Dreams by John scientific terrorist in action

False Claims about great progress of Islamic Cartography

There has been said many claims about high developed cartography due to Islam in the Middle East, that is why I gathered here few maps dating across the whole history so you can see at your own when the important achievements happened and you can realize that the Islamic cartography was not so great how Muslims often say.

450 B.C. – Modern Reconstruction of Herodotus World Map

for more different reconstructions go here

900 B.C. – 160 A.D. – Maps of the Greek World

1154 A.D. – Tabula Rogeriana, probably one of the most famous map of the Islamic World drawn by Al-Idrisi (note the interesting point that the map was painted for the Christian king Roger II of Sicily

The map is inverted (original is painted with South oriented down)

13th century – a copy of Ptolemy’s map from 13th century, the map was widely used by overseas explorers, probably also by Christopher Colombus

1596 A.D. – the Christian Knight world map, one of the first map covering the whole Earth

16th century – 21st century – Merkator projection, satellite maps, GPS, weather maps, Globe models, …..

Conclusion: Islamic Empire did some minor development, but by and large it just followed high standard from the Ancient World (the list of Ancient Maps), which were almost completely conquered by Islam. The most important steps were achieved during the Renaissance (see the list of Renaissance maps) and later in 20th century with digitalization.