From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Cartography / Geography / Voyages / Travels Outline

Perhaps the Oldest Map in the World
(10,000 BCE)

A Wallpainting that Could be a Landscape or a Map
(Circa 6,200 BCE)

The Oldest Map Clearly Marked with Distances
(343 BCE – 313 BCE)

The Mawangui Silk Texts
(Circa 175 BCE)

At Alexandria Ptolemy Writes the Almagest, the Cosmographia, and the Tetrabiblos
(Circa 100 CE – 178 CE)

The Forma Urbis Romae
(203 CE – 211 CE)

Early Flat-Earth View of the World
(Circa 850)

The Periplus of Hanno the Navigator
(Circa 850 – 950)

Medieval Encyclopedia, of which the Autograph Manuscript Survived
(Circa 1090 – 1125)

The Tabula Peutingeriana
(Circa 1250)

The Travels of Niccolo and Maffeo Polo
(1266)

Carrying the Pope's Response to Kublai Khan
(1271)

The Lure and Romance of Travel to the East
(1298 – 1299)

A Celebrated Medieval Map & the Greatest Extant 13th Century Pictorial Manuscript
(Circa 1300)

The Most Accurate World Map for Three Centuries
(Circa 1300)

The Oldest Map of Africa
(1389)

Medieval Mappa Mundi, Stolen during an Auction
(1411 – 1419)

The Earliest Known Treatise on Shipbuilding
(1434)

"The Greatest Memorial of Medieval Cartography"
(Circa 1450)

The First Map Included in a Printed Book
(November 19, 1472)

The First Printed Edition of the First Geography Contains No Maps
(September 13, 1475)

The First Book with Engraved Maps
(1477)

The First Illustrated Travel Book: An International Bestseller
(February 11, 1486)

Departure of Columbus for the New World & the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain
(July 30 – August 3, 1492)

The First Eyewitness Report to Become a Bestseller
(February 15, 1493)

The Nuremberg Chronicle
(July 12 – December 1493)

The First Map to Name America: The Waldseemuller Wall Map and the Waldseemuller Gores
(April 1507)

The First European-Style World Map in Chinese and the First Chinese Map to Show the Americas
(1602)

The First Extensive Moon Atlas
(1647)

The First Independently Published Bibliography of Mathematics
(1688)

The First Map of All of New Spain
(1691)

The First Bibliography of Americana
(1713)

The First Textbook on Zoogeography
(1777)

The First Catalogue of the Library of Congress
(April 1802 – October 1803)

The First World Atlas Printed by Muslims
(April 1803 – March 1804)

The Metric System
(1806 – 1821)

The First Comprehensive World-Wide Study of Zoogeography
(1876)

The First Manned Apollo Flights Occur
(December 24, 1968)

Discovery of Citation Mapping
(1973)

The Bibliometrics of Science
(February 14, 1998)

Supposedly the Largest Atlas Ever Published as a Printed Book
(October 2008)

Higher Resolution Map of Knowledge Than Can be Produced from Citation Analysis
(March 11, 2009)

A "Significant Amount" of Water is Discovered on the Moon
(November 13, 2009)

The 2010 Social Networking "World Map"
(August 5, 2010)