Livin'

centuriespast:

Map Of The World

Clay tablet; map of the world; shows the world as a disc, surrounded by a ring of water called the “Bitter River”; “Babylon” is marked as a rectangle at the right end of the Euphrates although the city actually occupied both banks of the river during most of its history; the river Euphrates flows south to a horzontal band, of which the right end is marked “marsh” and the left end is marked “outflow”, thus the marshes at the head of the Gulf and either the Shatt al-Arab or where the river meets the cosmic “Bitter River”; to the right of the “marsh” is a double curving line with a broken and unintelligible inscription; small circles are used to indicate cities or districts, and two of which are identied as “Assyria” and “Der”; three other geographical areas are marked, namely Bit-Yakin, the territory of an Aramaean tribal group around the southern Euphrates, is placed above its “outflow”. Habban, the homeland ofd a Kassite tribal group around Kermanshah in western Iran, is placed quite wrongly to the west of Babylon. Urartu, an independent kingdom around the modern borders of Iran, Turkey and Russia, is placed relatively correctly to the north of Assyria. 

Late Babylonian 6thC BC

The British Museum