Maps Charts Index
Hub
Maps and charts are among the most revealing primary sources in historical research — every map carries the assumptions, knowledge limits, and intelligence priorities of the people and institutions that made it. The subdomain indexes cartographic primary sources across every era and tradition: Babylonian world maps, the Ptolemaic Geographia and its medieval transmission, the Roman Peutinger Table, Islamic Golden Age cartography (al-Idrisi, al-Khwarizmi), portolan charts of the Mediterranean trading powers, the dramatic European cartographic expansion 1450–1750 (Waldseemüller, Mercator, Hondius, Blaeu), the great naval hydrographic programmes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the British Hydrographic Office founded 1795, the French Dépôt des cartes et plans de la Marine, the Spanish Dirección de Hidrografía), nineteenth-century imperial mapping (Ordnance Survey, the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India), and twentieth-century military cartography and satellite imagery. Notes catalogue where charts survive, how to access them, what they show and don’t show, and how they relate to the events any given subdomain covers. The charts available to Trafalgar-era commanders — many decades old, hand-corrected from generations of observations — that the current vault focus examines are one slice of this much longer story. Adjacent to MOC_Science_Knowledge (Cartography and Navigation Astronomy subdomains), MOC_Primary_Documents, and MOC_Geography_Places.
Primary Notes
(empty — populated as content is added)
Roadmap
(planned notes as red-links — add as research identifies gaps)
Methodology
- Maps as Primary Sources — Reading Cartographic Intent and Limits
- Map Provenance and Forgery Detection
- Digital Map Archives — Major Online Collections and Access
Ancient and Classical
- The Babylonian World Map c. 600 BC — Earliest Surviving Map of the World
- Ptolemy’s Geographia — Coordinate Cartography and Its Long Transmission
- The Peutinger Table — Roman Road Network and Its Twelfth-Century Copy
Medieval
- Mappae Mundi — Hereford, Ebstorf, and Medieval European World Maps
- Al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana — Twelfth-Century Norman-Sicilian Cartography
- Portolan Charts — Mediterranean Trading Powers and Coastal Knowledge
Early Modern
- Waldseemüller’s 1507 World Map — First Naming of America
- Mercator’s Projection 1569 — Navigation and Distortion
- Blaeu Atlas Maior 1662 — Dutch Cartographic Apogee
- The British Hydrographic Office Founded 1795 — Institutional Origins
Age of Sail (current vault focus)
- Charts Aboard the Trafalgar Fleet — What Navigation Documents the Royal Navy Carried
- Contemporary Battle Plans of Trafalgar — Versions, Discrepancies, and Tactical Evidence
- Mackenzie’s Atlantic Neptune — American Coastal Surveys and British Naval Use
- French Dépôt des cartes et plans de la Marine — Rival Hydrographic Programme
- NMM Chart Collection — Holdings, Catalogue, and Research Access
Modern (1815–present)
- The Ordnance Survey and Nineteenth-Century British Cartography
- The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India 1802–1871
- Twentieth-Century Military Cartography — Two World Wars and the Cold War
- Satellite Imagery as Historical Source — Declassified CORONA and KH-Series Programmes
Cross-Cutting
- See also: MOC_Primary_Documents
- See also: _Home