In 168 B.C., a lacquer box containing three maps drawn on silk was placed in the tomb of a Han Dynasty general at the site of Mawangdui in southeastern China’s Hunan Province. The general was most likely the son of Li Cang, the ruler of the Changsha Kingdom—a fiefdom of the Han Empire—whose own well-appointed tomb lay nearby.

Each map presents a section of the Changsha Kingdom. One map, now largely in tatters and difficult to read, seems to show a city or mausoleum. Another focuses on the locations of military garrisons in a region that lay near Changsha’s frontier with a fractious neighboring kingdom. The third map, shown here, illustrates the mountains, rivers, and important settlements of the southern half of Changsha.

The Mawangdui maps demonstrate a high degree of standardization, especially in their use of abstract signs, such as squares to symbolize cities, says Cordell Yee, a cartographic historian at St. John’s College in Annapolis. He points out that the maps are so sophisticated that they were likely produced according to long-established cartographic traditions. “This suggests mapmaking was already well developed in China by this time,” says Yee. The maps were undoubtedly indispensable for administrative and military planning purposes, but they may also have been enjoyed as works of art. Next to depictions of a prominent mountain range, the Jiuyi Shan, or Nine Beguiling Mountains, the dark area at the far left, the mapmaker carefully drew in shadowy images that may depict the reflection of the peaks in a nearby lake.

The world’s oldest known geological map is a nine-foot-long papyrus from the Egyptian village of Deir el-Medina, home to the New Kingdom craftsmen who worked in the Valley of the Kings. Created by Amennakhte, the chief scribe of the royal necropolis, the papyrus depicts a dry riverbed called the Wadi Hammamat in Egypt’s eastern desert. The wadi had been used for quarrying and mining for centuries, and as a route connecting the Nile Valley to the Red Sea for millennia. No map would have been needed for general travel, according to Egyptologist Andreas Dorn of Uppsala University and linguist Stéphane Polis of the University of Liège. Instead, the papyrus was created as a commemorative record of a pharaonic expedition, perhaps during the reign of Ramesses IV (r. ca. 1153–1147 B.C.), to a bekhen-stone quarry. Bekhen-stone, or greywacke, was prized for use in high-quality sculptures. To distinguish types of stone, Amennakhte employed dark brown to represent bekhen-stone, pink for deposits of granite and gold, and spots for alluvial deposits.

The scribe also included quarried bekhen-stone blocks with their measurements, as well as roads and directions in hieroglyphs, such as “road leading to the sea.” Amennakhte also drew natural and built landmarks including small trees, bushes, and a well, along with a monument to Seti I (r. ca. 1294–1279 B.C.) and a temple to the god Amun, both illustrated in white at the far left. “Amennakhte definitely had experience visualizing complex structures, as he was also responsible for drawing tombs. He was able to represent topographical information by flattening out such things as roads and the natural environment,” says Polis. “This unique document mixes geographical and geological information in a way that anticipates many of our modern mapmaking practices.”

The Forma Urbis Romae, or map of the city of Rome, was a massive plan of the layout of the city under the emperor Septimius Severus (r. A.D. 193–211). Although only a small portion of the plan survives, scholars are relatively certain it illustrated most of the city. This fragment shows commercial structures on the southeastern slope of the Viminal Hill. The Forma Urbis adorned the wall of a room in Rome’s Temple of Peace that might have served as an archive of maps and records. Drawn at a scale of 1:240, the plan resembles a land surveying map, in that it includes not only streets and blocks, but also interior features of buildings, such as colonnades and staircases. However, its monumental size—60 feet by 43 feet—suggests a decorative rather than practical function, says archaeologist Susann Lusnia of Tulane University. “The Forma Urbis provided an overview of the changes made to Rome by Severus in his quest for legitimacy and establishment of his dynastic succession,” she says. “The marble plan was itself a monument to the Severan legacy in Rome.” Severus’ ambitious building program included both restoration of older monuments and creation of new ones as part of his effort to draw attention to his nascent dynasty.