The Expression of Terrestrial and Celestial Order in Ancient Mesopotamia

Abstract

This chapter examines the various cultural contexts for mapmaking in ancient Mesopotamia, focusing on maps on cuneiform tablets and how they served as expressions of terrestrial and celestial order during the period. It begins by looking at the history of mapmaking in the ancient Near East before turning to a discussion of evidence for plans of houses and other buildings. It then considers field surveys, city maps, regional maps, a map of the world, and the establishment of a spatial organization in the heavenly cosmos. It also comments on the representation of practical geography in literary form, in itineraries attested from Old Babylonian times up to Neo- Assyrian. The chapter shows how the maps of cities with their waterways and surrounding physical landscape combine cartography of sacred space, depicted in the temple plans, with that of economic space, seen in the field surveys.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.