Oldest map of the world on nearly 3,000-year-old Babylonian tablet deciphered to reveal surprisingly familiar story
The “oldest map of the world in the world” on a Babylonian clay tablet was deciphered over multiple centuries to reveal a surprisingly familiar story, according to a recent video published by the British Museum.
The cuneiform tablet from the 6th century BC shows an aerial view map of Mesopotamia — roughly modern-day Iraq — and what the Babylonians believed lay beyond the known world at the time.
The ancient artifact, discovered in the Middle East, was acquired by the British Museum in 1882 but remained a mystery for centuries until curators found a missing part and transcribed its cuneiform.
The tablet has several paragraphs of the cuneiform on its backside and above the map diagram describing the creation of the Earth and what its writer believed existed beyond it.
The map shows Mesopotamia surrounded by a double ring — which the ancient scribe labeled the “bitter river,” a river that created the borders around the Babylonians’ known world.
Inside the bitter river, small circles and rectangles represent different cities and tribes in Mesopotamia including Babylon, and another rectangle represents the Euphrates River.
“You have encapsulated in this circular diagram the whole of the known world in which people lived, flourished and died,” British Museum curator and cuneiform expert Dr. Irving Finkel said in the video. “However, there’s more to this map than that.”
“When it comes to operating beyond the limits of the known world into the world of imagination, [the tablet] is indispensable,” Finkel added.
The Babylonian scribe also mapped out what they believed existed outside their world, including mythical creatures and lands as well as a reference to a well-known story today — essentially the Babylonian version of the biblical story of Noah’s Ark.
The ancient Babylonians believed the remnants of the giant ark built in 1800 BC by their version of Noah, named Utnapishtim, at the instruction of God lay beyond the bitter river on the backside of a mountain — the same mountain that Noah’s Ark crashed on, according to the Bible.
“That’s quite a meaty thing, quite an interesting thing to think about because it shows that the story was the same, and of course, that one led to the other,” Finkel concluded.
