I was recently thinking - where does the concept of north/east/south/west come from? Wikipedia says the compass turned up around 1300ish, but as far as I understand maps were north-orientated before this, and names of places also referred to their latitudinal location. Just wondering if anyone knows anything about this. North=cold, south=warm makes sense I suppose, but is that the only explanation?
hi! you'll find a few comments on map orientation in this FAQ section
and this recent post has a comment on the cardinal directions in general, plus links to several more related posts. The quick tl;dr is that the directions we currently use are relative to the sun: it rises in the east, sets in the west, if you face east then one side is north and the other is south