Old Maps Online, just launched this week, is the reportedly the largest collection of historical maps online.
You can do a text search, or browse around on an interactive map for locations for which you’d like to find older maps. You can filter the results by year. Above is the oldest map of the entire continent of Africa that I could find – from 1717.
(via Ars Technica)
See also:
Strange Maps blog
Borges’s story about a map as big as the territory it represented compared to Google Maps:
It is in these days that we are witnessing the collective creation of a map even more exact that Borges could imagine; one that describes the limits, the roads, and the shores of every territory on the planet. At the same time it uncovers another ambition more perfect and occult: that every shepherd or “emperor” can edit their own map as they wish, they can forge their own version of the world. In that map we will have a blueprint of human life: Things moving, crimes, thefts, migrating animals, childhood memories, imaginary battles between good and evil, hookers and ogres, real-time weather. In all, anything that can be pointed down to the soil and be named.
Full Story: Mira: Google Maps according to Jorge Luis Borges
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