What was the Babylonian Map of the World like? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

A quick note: When I talk about how Mesopotamians viewed the world, I'm speaking exclusively of scholars and other members of the elite. The literacy rates in ancient Mesopotamia were extremely low (at best around 7% of the entire population), and amongst those, even fewer were educated to such an advanced degree as to appreciate the rich variety of information found on the Map.

So, the Babylonian Map of the world is one of the oldest world maps in existence. It features the world as a circle, and combines multiple types of information to describe the world according to the Babylonians. It reveals how ancient scholars united scientific observation with theology to express the world’s nature and composition in a single cohesive form. In that sense, it is as much a cosmological diagram as a physical descriptor of the world.

From the colophon on the reverse, we know that it is a copy of an older copy tablet, which may date to the Old Babylonian Period (c. 1894–1595 BCE).

I'll break down the elements of the Map itself, as well as the cuneiform writing that accompanies it. This will be long, as there's a lot of detail.

The world disc is surrounded by an outer ring, which represents the ocean. (The hole in the middle of the map is where the scribe placed a compass point so that he could draw two perfect concentric circles.) Labelled in Akkadian as ‘marratu’, these ancient “bitter waters” were believed to surround the world, and originated from a time before Marduk the god of Babylon created the world.
Beyond the ocean are the outer triangles, which are labelled as “regions” (nagȗ). These lands beyond the sea are unchartered territories. Originally there were eight nagȗ, as described on the reverse side of the tablet. As a geographic term, this word was used in Late Babylonian royal inscriptions to refer to distant, unspecified areas. It may be that the nagȗ describe real islands. Another possibility is that the nagȗ extend over the edge of the world, so that one could fall into the underworld. The missing northern nagȗ is identified as “a place where the Sun is not seen”. This may be describing a mythic land of perpetual darkness associated with the underworld, or it might be a scientific observation. The Babylonians may have been superstitious, but they were not stupid. They had already spent thousands of years continually of observing the night sky. Ancient Mesopotamian astronomers would have been perfectly aware that the sun "when viewed from the latitude of Mesopotamia, never passes through the northern portion of the sky. North of the Tropic of Cancer, the sun describes an arc in the southern sky throughout the entire year” (Horowitz, 1988.)
The River Euphrates (the line running through the middle of the world disc.) The Babylonian Map of the World only shows only the River Euphrates—depicted as the vertical channel running roughly through the centre of the inner disc. However it is impossible to discuss one river without the other. The rivers’ great size allowed for the mass transportation of goods. Cities such as Babylon were established on both sides of the river , allowing for greater control and expansion.
The Babylonian Map of the World also depicts mountains, which, given their relative position to the cities, probably denotes the Armenian Highlands. Thanks to evidence from literary texts and royal inscriptions, we know that mountains were associated with chaos. They were a source of monsters, and barbarous enemy peoples.
A canal is depicted as a horizontal line along the lower part of the world disc. Canal building in ancient Mesopotamia was practised from at least the 3rd Millennium BCE. This controlled and conserved water during the dry months, allowing for longer periods of cultivation. By developing perennial irrigation, crops were watered regularly through a system of small channels dug throughout the fields. This enabled more land to be converted into farmland, and also helped to control the annual floods which mitigated damage to both fields and settlements.
Various cities and regions are also described. Urartu, Assyria, Der, Susa, Chaldea, Habban and Babylon (the rectangular shape sitting across the Euphrates). These are not necessarily in the correct geographic position to one another, but their inclusion speaks of their importance in the original design.
The writing above the Map gives a description of the world's inhabitants (besides humans). While fragmentary, it also makes references to the Babylonian Creation Myth, as well as the hero of the Flood Myth (Utnapishtim), the Old Akkadian king Sargon, and his fictional enemy Nur-Dagan of Purushanda.
The writing on the reverse describes the distances which exist between the various places described on the map.

To the Mesopotamians, religion was an important part of the way in which they viewed the universe, how they understood it and how they explained it to themselves. Both in Assyria and Babylonia, scholar-scribes were the elite intellectuals of society, advising their kings by interpreting omens and scholarly texts in order to provide the right answer. To them, the world was not just the Tigris and Euphrates, desert, mountains and the ocean. It was more than the cities, the wilderness and their human and animal inhabitants. It was a combination of these and a mythical and religious dimension that existed in the same space.

The inclusion of Marduk on the Map and the references to his role in the Babylonian Creation Myth demonstrate how his presence and role in the world’s existence is as real and valid the geographical and human features on the map. Likewise, the other literary references were well known throughout Mesopotamia and the wider ancient Near Eastern region. We know this thanks to the discovery of copies of these texts at multiple sites. Their inclusion on the Babylonian Map of the World might have been to emphasise the outermost parts of the known world, and making them culturally familiar.

The scribe, carefully making a fresh copy of an old tablet depicting the Map of the World, would have been familiar with all the geographic features, the mythological and mortal inhabitants, the cities and the regions. He would have understood intuitively how all these elements coexisted simultaneously, both on the clay in his hands, and in the world around him.