Political Boundaries: How the Map's Regions Are Drawn

The ancient world did not measure or record political boundaries the way we do. No surveyor ran a line from one end of a border to the other. Few maps survive, and none of them shows the borders between kingdoms. The Babylonian Map of the World is a picture of the world as Babylon saw it, not a scale drawing. The other surviving maps are local plans of a city, a field or a mining district, with no common scale or projection.

Instead of mapping borders, the ancients named them. A border might be fixed at a river, a mountain pass, a fortress or a boundary stone ("You shall not move your neighbor's landmark," Deuteronomy 19:14). Or it might be described by listing the towns on each side, the way Joshua 13-19 describes the tribal lands and the Hittite treaties set out a vassal's lands. Between those fixed points the line was never drawn. Borders also moved constantly: with conquests, revolts, treaties, royal marriages and the death of a strong king.

So a state's border was rarely a line where a fence or sign could have stood. Each state had a well-defined core: its capital and the cities and trade routes it firmly held. Around that core lay a zone where its control thinned out and overlapped with the control of its neighbors. Our map has no good way to show that fading, and a blur would make it harder to tell who held what anyway. So we draw a single line. Read it as a point somewhere within a zone of transition, not as a border that existed on the ground.

States, Not Nations

The map draws states, not nations. A nation is a people, related by birth and sharing a language, a religion and a way of life; when you see the word nation, think people, not country. A state is a government holding power over a territory and the people in it. A map can draw a state, but it cannot draw a nation: a people could live on both sides of a line, move away, or outlive the state that ruled them. Israel was a nation long before it was a state, and remained a nation after its state fell. The map's layers show the different structures of power:

• Tribal territories: the land a tribe lived in at a given time. This is the closest a map can come to a nation, but even here the shape is the land, not the people.
• Kingdoms, provinces and city-states: states, each a government over its own territory.
• Empires: one king ruling many states.
• Vassal and tributary overlays (dashed lines): states that kept their own kings but answered to a stronger power and paid it tribute. The ancient world saw no contradiction in a king being sovereign at home and subject abroad.
• Water: where the sea reached beyond today's coast, as with the head of the Persian Gulf.

These layers overlap on purpose. In 701 BC Judah was a kingdom with its own king, and it also lay under the power of Assyria. Both are true, so both are drawn.

How the Regions Are Drawn

We start from each state's core: its capital and the other major cities and trade centers it is known to have held. We then work outward using the Bible, royal inscriptions and stelae (such as the Mesha Stele and Sennacherib's Prism), letters such as the Amarna letters, chronicles and other ancient texts that say who controlled which cities and lands. The studies of modern historians and archaeologists who have worked through that evidence come next. Where the texts fall silent, natural barriers such as deserts, mountains, rivers and coastlines usually set the edge. Where two states met, they share one border, so the map neither leaves a false gap nor draws the same ground twice by accident. Each region lists its sources.

Why Our Map Differs from Others

You will find differences between this map and others you have seen. Part of the reason is the method above. Part is time: a printed map must choose one moment, or merge a whole era into one picture, often a power's greatest extent. Because this map is tied to the timeline, its regions change as you move through the years, and a power grows or shrinks stage by stage.

Always Being Corrected

As we find errors, and as new discoveries and research appear, we will keep adjusting the regions so they reflect the historical truth as accurately as we can.