According to a recent video released by the British Museum, “the world’s oldest known map of the world,” drawn on a Babylonian clay tablet, has been deciphered over the centuries to reveal a surprisingly familiar story.
A 6th century BC cuneiform tablet shows an aerial view of Mesopotamia (roughly the area of modern-day Iraq) and what the Babylonians believed to be beyond the known world.
Discovered in the Middle East, the ancient artifact was acquired by the British Museum in 1882 but remained a mystery for centuries until curators discovered missing sections and transcribed the cuneiform inscriptions.
On the back of the tablet and above the map are several cuneiform paragraphs that describe the creation of the Earth and what its author believed to be on the other side of the Earth.
The map shows Mesopotamia surrounded by a double ring, which ancient scribes named the “Bitter River,” a river that drew a boundary around the world as the Babylonians knew it.
The smaller circles and rectangles inside the Bitter River represent different cities and tribes of Mesopotamia, including Babylon, and another rectangle represents the Euphrates River.
“In this circular diagram, we see the entire known world condensed, in which people lived, thrived, and died,” Dr. Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum and an expert on cuneiform writing, said in the video. “But there’s much more to this map than that.”
“When it comes to stepping beyond the boundaries of the known world and into the imagination, (tablets) are essential,” Finkel added.
Babylonian scribes also marked on their maps things they believed existed outside their own world, including mythical creatures and lands, as well as references to stories familiar today (essentially a Babylonian version of the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark).
The ancient Babylonians believed that the remains of a giant ark, built in 1800 BCE at divine direction by their interpretation of Noah, named Utnapishtim, lay behind a mountain across the Bitter River – the same mountain that, according to the Bible, Noah’s Ark crashed into.
“This is very important and very interesting to think about, because it shows that the stories are the same and, of course, one leads to the other,” Finkel concluded.
