The variety of ways that different cultures situated themselves directionally varied greatly, and often was very separate from the cardinal points. For example river cultures usually use systems of "upstream, downstream, towards the water, away from the water." If they live on a river by the coast, this might include "inside, outside" and primary directions. Even in large open areas where it might make sense to primarily use NSEW systems, many cultures used winds primarily, as it was fairly easy to determine wind characteristics and they tended to be fairly predictable. For example, although the Inuit have stories of constellations and words for NSEW, they still would navigate in winter by wind, as the sky was often not visible. With at least one of the languages I've worked with, a culture spread up and down the coast of BC far enough to round a bend that bent the wind, and as a result the word that means North up the coast now means North-west down around the point - the important thing is the type of weather that comes from that direction, the stories that characterize the wind, and so on. Most of these groups still had words for NSEW, but they were often just things like "from the direction of the X river basin" and so on - i.e. they were meaningful terms.

The physical theory of classical electromagnetism has its roots in the 1800s. Prior to that no culture had a concept of "magnetic field".