A recent video from the British Museum reveals that the world’s oldest world map, written on clay tablets from Babylon, has been deciphered, revealing a surprisingly familiar story.
The oldest globe ever discovered is the Imago Mundi, a Babylonian world map. This map is a Babylonian clay tablet with a schematic world map and two inscriptions written in Akkadian. This map was probably created in the 7th century BC. It shows only a small part of the world known to the ancient Babylonians and was discovered in the southern Iraqi city of Abu Haba (Sippar).
This ancient artifact entered the British Museum in 1882, but remained a mystery for centuries until curators found the missing pieces and transcribed the cuneiform writing.
A cuneiform tablet from the 6th century BC shows an aerial map of Mesopotamia (the land between the rivers in modern-day Iraq) and what the Babylonians believed to be beyond the known world at the time .
After centuries of deciphering, this ancient stone tablet provides insight into the Babylonians’ beliefs about the known world at the time.
On the back of the tablet and above the map are several paragraphs in cuneiform that explain the creation of the Earth and what its author believed existed beyond the Earth.
Researchers have confirmed that the circle around Mesopotamia suggests that the Babylonians believed this region to be the center of the world. The Euphrates River, which runs through ancient Mesopotamia, is also depicted.
The map depicts a double ring surrounding Mesopotamia, which ancient scribes called the “Bitter River.” This river formed the boundary of the Babylonians’ known world. Small circles and rectangles inside the Bitter River represent various Mesopotamian cities and tribes, such as Babylon, and another rectangle symbolizes the Euphrates River.
Dr. Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum and an expert on cuneiform, said in the video, “In this circular diagram we condense the entirety of the known world, where people lived, flourished, and died.” Ta. “But there’s more to this map than that.”
“When we go beyond the limits of the known world into the world of imagination, [the tablet] It’s essential,” Finkel added.
Babylonian scribes not only mapped out what they thought existed outside their world, but also used famous stories (basically the Babylonian version of the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark) and mythological I also included references to animals and land.
The ancient Babylonians named their version of Utnapishtim the remains of the giant ark built by Noah on divine command in 1800 B.C., where the Bible says Noah’s ark crashed I thought it was on the other side of the mountain. bitter river
“This is very telling and very interesting to think about because it shows that the stories are the same and of course one led to the other,” Finkel said. concluded.
This tablet also confirms that the Babylonians believed in Marduk, the god of creation, and other mythical monsters such as the scorpion-man and the lion-headed bird called the anzu.
Cover image credit: Osama Shukir Muhammad Amin
