Discoveries that changed the world | Maps

ArabiaWeather - Today we use geographic information system (GIS) and satellites to draw digital maps of any place in the world, but before this modern technology, maps were drawn according to the descriptions provided by travelers and pilgrims, as the person needed since ancient times something to help him know the way in his travels.

Since the seventh century, Arab and Muslim travelers began to leave their homes and homelands for religious and commercial reasons, and to explore the world. In the eighth century in Baghdad, it became possible to draw the first map as a guide for travels.

While the Muslims were exploring the world, Europeans' knowledge in this field was limited to their local areas, and the great European explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would not have set out if it were not for the geographers and map makers from the Islamic world.

It is the contributions of Muslims in cartography

• Al-Idrisi: Al-Idrisi is considered the first to develop cartography in a more accurate manner than the maps that were previously known, who divided the land as he envisioned it into seven regions, and divided each region into ten equal sections, then described each section and drew a map for it, and his book remained a reference for European scholars More than three centuries.

• Al-Maqdisi: He was the first to use color in maps.

• Ibn Hawqal: He wrote a book called The Image of the Earth, and drew its maps in a schematic engineering way.

• Al-Masoudi: who spoke about the Americas in his book in the year 956 AD, which proves that Muslims discovered the Americas 500 years before Columbus, and his map is considered the most accurate maps that appeared to define the known world at that time; Where I think the Earth is rotated.

• Written by the astronomer Al-Biruni, I mentioned a better and easier way to calculate the circumference of the Earth

• Ahmed Muhyiddin Perry O Piri Rais, who drew a map of the New World in 1513 which provides an accurate description of the Americas and navigation around Africa long before many Europeans.

He drew a second map in 1528, but we did not reach a sixth of the map, but it contained rich details of the ocean and the New World from Venezuela to Newfandland.

Perhaps the most astounding world map was the one made on Hungary in 1567, which explained the world in fine detail similar to modern maps captured by satellites from Earth's outer space.