Map of a Mountainous Region
Unknown · Neo-Babylonian period, 604-539 BC
A clay tablet twelve centimetres high carries one of the few surviving maps from ancient Mesopotamia. Mountains are drawn as a row of squares, each labelled with the cuneiform sign KUR, which means mountain in Sumerian and was read shadu in Akkadian. A path is indicated at the top, a river runs across the middle, and at the bottom an irrigation canal is crossed by smaller secondary channels. The words for road and river appear as captions. The back of the tablet is blank and the piece is incomplete, but the layout of the landscape is easy to follow.
The region shown is probably somewhere east of Babylonia, perhaps in the foothills of the Zagros mountains on the border with Iran, where rivers came down from the hills into the irrigated plain. Maps like this were practical documents, made to record the boundaries of fields or the routes of canals rather than to picture the world, but the convention of squares for mountains is the same one used on the famous Babylonian map of the world in the British Museum. The Louvre purchased the tablet in 1921.
Did You Know? The mapmaker drew every mountain as a square and then wrote the word mountain inside it, just in case.
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