The earliest known maps were made in Babylon on clay tablets, as long ago as 2300 BC. Some Egyptian drawings and paintings found in tombs are almost as old. The Greek mathematician Ptolemy (AD 90-168) produced an enormous eight-volume guide to geography and map-making called The Guide to Geography. It was followed carefully by map-makers for almost 1,000 years.
It is not possible to draw the curved surface of the globe accurately on a flat sheet of paper. This problem puzzled mapmakers for many years. In 1569, Gerardus Mercator showed how to convert the rounded shape of the world into a cylindrical shape, which could be unrolled to make a flat map. However, this can distort the size of countries in the far north and south. Dividing the earth into "orange peel" segments gives a truer image of the size of countries.
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