Babylonian Map of the World

Overview

The Babylonian Map of the World is a clay tablet in the British Museum, BM 92687, carrying the oldest surviving map that attempts to show the whole world as its makers understood it. Babylon and the Euphrates sit at the centre, a ring of water the text calls the bitter river encloses the known land, and a set of triangular regions lies beyond the ring. Its cuneiform inscription, in Akkadian, names the places on the map and then describes what lies in the regions outside it.

Archaeological Evidence

The tablet was excavated at Sippar, north of Babylon, in the work directed by Hormuzd Rassam, and entered the British Museum in 1882; some scholars suggest it was written at Borsippa. It measures about 12.2 by 8.2 cm and is broken, with the upper part of the map lost, and a further fragment was joined to it as recently as 1995. It is dated no earlier than the ninth century BC and more probably to the late eighth or seventh, and the text states that it is a copy of an older map, so the tradition behind it is older than the object.

What the Map Shows

Named on the map are Babylon, Assyria, Susa, Der, Habban and Urartu, with circles for other cities, parallel lines for the southern marshes and a curve for the mountains to the north east. Beyond the bitter river the scribes drew triangular regions, called nagu, each introduced on the reverse with the distance needed to reach it. The reverse is damaged, and most of what it said about those regions is lost.

Biblical Significance

The tablet is not named in Scripture and does not name the ark. Its interest for the biblical account is twofold. Urartu, the name behind the "mountains of Ararat" of Genesis 8:4, appears on it as an ordinary known region to the north, which is how Babylonian scribes of the seventh century BC regarded it. And the fourth of the outer regions is described as holding something "as thick as a parsiktu-measure", a term Irving Finkel of the British Museum argues is used in Babylonian literature only for the ark of the flood survivor Utnapishtim. On his reading the map records a Babylonian belief about where the flood vessel came to rest, in the direction of Urartu. That reading is one scholar's inference from a broken passage, and the map itself makes no such statement.