We could call the time in which we live the “Infor­ma­tion Age.” Or we could describe it more vivid­ly as the era of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Mar­tin Scors­ese and Steven Spiel­berg, Oprah Win­frey and Martha Stew­art, Bey­on­cé and Bob Dylan. What­ev­er you think of the work of any of these fig­ures in par­tic­u­lar, you can hard­ly deny the impact they’ve had on our cul­ture. Were we liv­ing a cen­tu­ry ago, we might have said the same of Hen­ry Ford and John D. Rock­e­feller, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzger­ald (though he had­n’t quite pub­lished The Great Gats­by yet), Pablo Picas­so and Char­lie Chap­lin, Marie Curie and Sig­mund Freud.

Were we liv­ing in the year 1225, our lives would’ve over­lapped with those of Leonar­do Fibonac­ci, Fran­cis of Assisi, Rumi, and Thomas Aquinas, as well as both Genghis Khan and his grand­son Kublai Khan.

All this is laid out visu­al­ly in The Big Map of Who Lived When, cre­at­ed ear­li­er this year by a Red­dit user called Profound_Whatever. As Big Think’s Frank Jacobs writes, the map reveals sur­pris­ing instances of con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous­ness, such as that cur­rent U.S. Pres­i­dent Joe Biden “for about a year was alive at the same time as Niko­la Tes­la (1854–1943), the Ser­bian-Amer­i­can inven­tor who devel­oped the alter­nat­ing cur­rent (AC) sys­tem that is used for dis­trib­ut­ing elec­tric­i­ty.”

For “anoth­er, more recent (and more baf­fling) over­lap: The life of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), who wrote The Lord of the Rings, coin­cid­ed ever so slight­ly with that of Eminem.” Going far­ther into the past, how many of us were ful­ly aware that “Christo­pher Colum­bus (1451–1506), Leonar­do da Vin­ci (1452–1519), and Mar­tin Luther (1483–1546) were con­tem­po­raries of each oth­er”? Or that “the lives of Oliv­er Cromwell (1599–1658) and René Descartes (1596–1650) synced almost per­fect­ly with each oth­er, despite the one being the dog­mat­i­cal­ly Puri­tan fig­ure­head of the Eng­lish Civ­il War, and the oth­er the father of mod­ern, ratio­nal­ist phi­los­o­phy by giv­ing doubt to a cen­tral role in the pur­suit of truth”?

The Big Map of Who Lived When uses a col­or-cod­ing sys­tem to divide the fig­ures whose lifes­pans it charts into eight cat­e­gories, includ­ing artists (Leonar­do da Vin­ci, Rube Gold­berg), thinkers (John Locke, Charles Dar­win), “busi­ness & indus­try” (includ­ing famed pirates from Hen­ry Mor­gan to Black­beard), and “lead­ers & bad­dies” (Napoleon, Adolf Hitler). It all reminds us that we’d give any­thing for a chance to meet some of them, or to stay out of the path of oth­ers. Of course, the indi­vid­u­als we think of as hav­ing defined a par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal era weren’t always regard­ed that way by every­one else who lived at the same time: some­thing it would­n’t hurt to bear in mind when con­sid­er­ing our own place in his­to­ry.

via Big Think

Relat­ed con­tent:

Joseph Priest­ley Visu­al­izes His­to­ry & Great His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures with Two of the Most Influ­en­tial Info­graph­ics Ever (1769)

5‑Minute Ani­ma­tion Maps 2,600 Years of West­ern Cul­tur­al His­to­ry

4000 Years of His­to­ry Dis­played in a 5‑Foot-Long “His­tom­ap” (Ear­ly Info­graph­ic) From 1931

180,000 Years of Reli­gion Chart­ed on a “His­tom­ap” in 1943

10 Mil­lion Years of Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in an Ele­gant, 5‑Foot Long Info­graph­ic from 1931

The His­to­ry of the World in One Video: Every Year from 200,000 BCE to Today

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Tak­ing a first glance at the Baby­lon­ian Map of the World, few of us could rec­og­nize it for what it is. But then again, few of us are any­thing like the British Muse­um Mid­dle East depart­ment cura­tor Irv­ing Finkel, whose vast knowl­edge (and abil­i­ty to share it com­pelling­ly) have made him a view­er favorite on the insti­tu­tion’s Youtube chan­nel. In the Cura­tor’s Cor­ner video above, he offers an up-close view of the Baby­lon­ian Map of the World — or rather, the frag­ment of the clay tablet from the eighth or sev­enth cen­tu­ry BC that he and oth­er experts have deter­mined con­tains a piece of the old­est map of the known world in exis­tence.

“If you look care­ful­ly, you will see that the flat sur­face of the clay has a dou­ble cir­cle,” Finkel says. With­in the cir­cle is cuneiform writ­ing that describes the shape as the “bit­ter riv­er” that sur­rounds the known world: ancient Mesopotamia, or mod­ern-day Iraq.

Inside the cir­cle lie rep­re­sen­ta­tions of both the Euphrates Riv­er and the mighty city of Baby­lon; out­side it lie a series of what schol­ars have deter­mined were orig­i­nal­ly eight tri­an­gles. “Some­times peo­ple say they are islands, some­times peo­ple say they are dis­tricts, but in point of fact, they are almost cer­tain­ly moun­tains,” which stand “far beyond the known world” and rep­re­sent, to the ancient Baby­lo­ni­ans, “places full of mag­ic, and full of mys­tery.”

Com­ing up with a coher­ent expla­na­tion of the map itself hinged on the dis­cov­ery, in the nine­teen-nineties, of one of those tri­an­gles orig­i­nal­ly thought to have been lost. This owes to the enthu­si­asm of a non-pro­fes­sion­al, a stu­dent in Finkel’s cuneiform night class­es named Edith Hors­ley. Dur­ing one of her once-a-week vol­un­teer shifts at the British Muse­um, she set aside a par­tic­u­lar­ly intrigu­ing clay frag­ment. As soon as Finkel saw it, he knew just the arti­fact to which it belonged. After the piece’s reat­tach­ment, much fell into place, not least that the map pur­port­ed to show the dis­tant loca­tion of the beached (or rather, moun­tained) ark built by “the Baby­lon­ian ver­sion of Noah” — the search for which con­tin­ues these nine or so mil­len­nia lat­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

When a Medieval Monk Crowd­sourced the Most Accu­rate Map of the World, Cre­at­ing “the Google Earth of the 1450s”

The Largest Ear­ly Map of the World Gets Assem­bled for the First Time: See the Huge, Detailed & Fan­tas­ti­cal World Map from 1587

The World Map That Intro­duced Sci­en­tif­ic Map­mak­ing to the Medieval Islam­ic World (1154 AD)

How Did Car­tog­ra­phers Cre­ate World Maps before Air­planes and Satel­lites? An Intro­duc­tion

The Evo­lu­tion of the World Map: An Inven­tive Info­graph­ic Shows How Our Pic­ture of the World Changed Over 1,800 Years

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Sasha Tru­bet­skoy, for­mer­ly an under­grad at U. Chica­go, has cre­at­ed a “sub­way-style dia­gram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD.” Draw­ing on Stanford’s ORBIS mod­el, The Pela­gios Project, and the Anto­nine Itin­er­ary, Tru­bet­skoy’s map com­bines well-known his­toric roads, like the Via Appia, with less­er-known ones (in somes cas­es giv­en imag­ined names). If you want to get a sense of scale, it would take, Tru­bet­skoy tells us, “two months to walk on foot from Rome to Byzan­tium. If you had a horse, it would only take you a month.”

You can view the map in a larg­er for­mat here. And if you fol­low this link and send Tru­bet­skoy a few bucks, he can email you a crisp PDF for print­ing. Find more focused, relat­ed maps by Tru­bet­skoy right here:

• The Roman Roads of Britain Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map
• The Roman Roads of Spain & Por­tu­gal Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map: Ancient His­to­ry Meets Mod­ern Graph­ic Design
• All the Roman Roads of Italy, Visu­al­ized as a Mod­ern Sub­way Map

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Roman Roads and Bridges You Can Still Trav­el Today

An Inter­ac­tive Map Shows Just How Many Roads Actu­al­ly Lead to Rome

How to Make Roman Con­crete, One of Human Civilization’s Longest-Last­ing Build­ing Mate­ri­als

If we want to know the pre­cise geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion of, say, a par­tic­u­lar church in Madrid, video arcade in Tokyo or cof­fee shop in Addis Aba­ba, we can fig­ure it out in a mat­ter of sec­onds. This is, in his­tor­i­cal terms, a recent devel­op­ment indeed: many of us remem­ber when the most detailed car­to­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion we could get about dis­tant lands (or for that mat­ter, most of our own land) revealed to us only its cities and major roads — assum­ing we even had a world atlas at hand. Now, younger peo­ple take for grant­ed the knowl­edge of not just where every place in the world is, but what it looks like, what its prices are, and what its vis­i­tors have said about it.

We live today, in oth­er words, in the dream of Fra Mau­ro, the Venet­ian car­tog­ra­ph­er-monk of the late Mid­dle Ages who cre­at­ed the most detailed and accu­rate world map to that point in human his­to­ry. “As a young man, Fra Mau­ro had been a sol­dier and mer­chant of the famed Venice Mer­chant Fleet,” says the site of New World Car­to­graph­ic. “His trav­els with the fleet around the Mediter­ranean and the Mid­dle East result­ed in his becom­ing inter­est­ed in map­ping, and he even­tu­al­ly set­tled in the monastery of San Michelle on the island of Mura­no, in the Venice Lagoon, where he became a lay broth­er.” In the ear­ly 1450s, “he was com­mis­sioned by King Afon­so V of Por­tu­gal to cre­ate a map of the world.”

Por­tu­gal’s will to dom­i­nate world trade, which required the most detailed maps pos­si­ble, was matched by Fra Mau­ro’s will to gath­er infor­ma­tion about every cor­ner of Earth, no mat­ter how far-flung. And he could do that with­out leav­ing Venice: as Atlas Obscu­ra’s Adam Kessler writes, “Arab traders and world explor­ers passed through the port, giv­ing Fra Mau­ro an incom­pa­ra­ble source of gos­sip and tall tales about the world. The fall of Con­stan­tino­ple, occur­ring a few years before the map was fin­ished, would also have pro­vid­ed a rich source of well-trav­eled refugees, pre­sum­ably will­ing to swap their sto­ries for some bread or beer.” Not only did the map’s phys­i­cal cre­ation require a team of col­lab­o­ra­tors, the gath­er­ing of its con­tents relied upon the fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry equiv­a­lent of crowd­sourc­ing.

This chap­ter of car­to­graph­i­cal his­to­ry invites such tech­no­log­i­cal analo­gies: Kessler calls Fra Mau­ro’s com­plet­ed map­pa mun­di “the Google Earth of the 1450s.” Despite his reli­gious affil­i­a­tion with the monastery of San Michele, Fra Mau­ro’s efforts pro­duced an unprece­dent­ed­ly rad­i­cal ren­di­tion of the world. Break­ing with reli­gious tra­di­tion, he did­n’t put Jerusalem in the cen­ter; “the Gar­den of Eden was rel­e­gat­ed to a side­box, not shown in a real geo­graph­ic loca­tion.” His scrupu­lous­ness made him the first car­tog­ra­ph­er “to depict Japan as an island, and the first Euro­pean to show that you could sail all the way around Africa.” While his map was “the most accu­rate ever made at the time,” its more than 3,000 anno­ta­tions do con­tain plen­ty of tall tales, often of lit­er­al giants. But are they real­ly much less trust­wor­thy than the aver­age twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry user review?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The World Map That Intro­duced Sci­en­tif­ic Map­mak­ing to the Medieval Islam­ic World (1154 AD)

Explore the Here­ford Map­pa Mun­di, the Largest Medieval Map Still in Exis­tence (Cir­ca 1300)

The Evo­lu­tion of the World Map: An Inven­tive Info­graph­ic Shows How Our Pic­ture of the World Changed Over 1,800 Years

Europe’s Old­est Map: Dis­cov­er the Saint-Bélec Slab (Cir­ca 2150–1600 BCE)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A beau­ti­ful ear­ly exam­ple of visu­al­iz­ing the flow of his­to­ry, Sebas­t­ian C. Adams’ Syn­chrono­log­i­cal Chart of Uni­ver­sal His­to­ry out­lines the evo­lu­tion of mankind from Adam and Eve to 1871, the year of its first edi­tion.

A recre­ation can be found and close­ly exam­ined at the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion, which allows you to zoom in on any part of the orig­i­nal time­line, which stretched to 23 feet in length and was designed for school­hous­es as a one-stop shop for all of his­to­ry.

As Daniel Rosen­berg and Antho­ny Grafton describe it in their book Car­togra­phies of Time:

The Syn­chrono­log­i­cal Chart is a great work of out­sider think­ing and a tem­plate for auto­di­dact study; it attempts to rise above the sta­tion of a mere his­tor­i­cal sum­ma­ry and to draw a pic­ture of his­to­ry rich enough to serve as a text­book in itself.

Adams was a vora­cious read­er and a good Chris­t­ian, and in the top half of the chart he attempts to untan­gle the spaghet­ti-like geneal­o­gy of Adam and Eve’s chil­dren from Abel (“The First Mar­tyr”) through to Solomon (whose tem­ple looks very Goth­ic), all the way through to Jesus and beyond.

At the same time he presents a detailed descrip­tion of archae­o­log­i­cal his­to­ry “after the flood,” from Stone Age tools through the ear­li­est civ­i­liza­tions, men­tion­ing major bat­tles, inven­tions, philoso­phers, and advances in sci­ence. Adams’ start­ing date of all his­to­ry comes from the Irish Arch­bish­op James Ussh­er, who, in 1654 declared, after years of study, that the earth was cre­at­ed on “night­fall on 22 Octo­ber 4004 BC.” (Now that’s cer­tain­ty!)

The map is col­or­ful and filled with beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions from the self-taught Adams, from a draw­ing of Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream to the cur­rent world lead­ers and a list of Unit­ed States Pres­i­dents up to James Garfield. There’s even a sec­tion at the far end for “Emi­nent Men not else­where men­tioned on the Chart,” the sign of a true com­pletist (except for the part where he leaves out women).

Adams lived far from the epi­cen­ters of Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion. He grew up in a Pres­by­ter­ian fam­i­ly in Ohio, and, when he showed a skill for teach­ing lat­er in life, he made the trek out west, near­ly dying on the Ore­gon Trail. He set­tled in Salem, Ore­gon and began teach­ing while also work­ing on his chart. When it was ready to print, he trav­eled back to Cincin­nati to hire the esteemed lith­o­g­ra­phers Stro­bridge & Co., who pub­lished Civ­il War scenes, maps, and cir­cus posters. Ini­tial­ly he sold the chart him­self, but its pop­u­lar­i­ty led to sev­er­al Amer­i­can and British print­ers pro­duc­ing copies into the 20th cen­tu­ry. Even Hor­ror writer H.P. Love­craft owned a copy.

It remains a riotous work of art, his­to­ry, reli­gion, and self-deter­mi­na­tion, and fac­sim­i­les can still be pur­chased online. Adams lat­er left teach­ing to become pres­i­dent of an insur­ance com­pa­ny, and died of “la grippe” (i.e. the flu) in 1898.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Oculi Mun­di: A Beau­ti­ful Online Archive of 130 Ancient Maps, Atlases & Globes

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.