A recent British Museum video reveals that the “oldest map of the world in the world” on a clay tablet from Babylon was deciphered to reveal a surprisingly familiar story.

The oldest globe ever found is the Imago Mundi, a Babylonian map of the world. This map is a Babylonian clay tablet with a schematic world map and two inscriptions written in the Akkadian language. The probably seventh century BC is when this map was created. It shows a small part of the world as the ancient Babylonians knew it, and it was found in the southern Iraqi city of Abu Habba (Sippar).

The ancient artifact was acquired by the British Museum in 1882 but remained a mystery for centuries until curators found a missing part and transcribed its cuneiform.

The cuneiform tablet from the 6th century BC shows an aerial view map of Mesopotamia — the land “between the rivers” in modern-day Iraq— and what the Babylonians believed lay beyond the known world at the time.

[arkeonews.net]

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