Bronze Age slab found in France is oldest 3D map in Europe
bbc.com
bbc.com
"The map of Cassini or map of the Academy is the first topographic and geometric map established of the Kingdom of France as a whole. The map was for the time a real innovation and a decisive technical advance. It is the first map to be based on a geodesic triangulation. Four generations of the Cassini carried out the work."
But it gets even more impressive when you know what the times were like when this map was made.
Neighbouring valleys hosted different languages that sometimes were not intelligible to each other.
In places, local people didn't have a name for the prominent mountain they grew up and spent their life under.
One of Cassini's young cartographers was notoriously killed by villagers who put an axe in his head, because pointing his mysterious brass and glass instruments at mountains and bell towers made them be sure he was a bad wizard.
Those were the times. And this is the map !
I work with several professional cartographers here in France. All of them have several large printed maps in their offices, just for the beauty of them. I don't know of one who does not have a Cassini map along, somewhere on an office wall.
They even have this line:
> Geo-location revealed the territory represented on the slab bears an 80% accuracy to an area around a 18 mile-long stretch of the river.
Which 18 mile-long section? That alone could have been provided.
This way you can see how the slab references real life points, which you can show on a correctly scaled map.
I'm half considering getting some stones and carving some bikes, cars or planes into for future civilizations to discover
I have similar findings near my house and I'm trying to investigate similarities
https://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/727/corstorphine_h...
It's quite interesting seeing how many things like this exist
"It was probably a way to affirm the ownership of the territory by a small prince or king at the time,"
Frustratingly I can't find a lovely quote I stumbled across recently that was (poorly paraphrased) something like 'Small men pointing at things on a map is the leading cause of war'.
It might have been from one of Simon Winder's superb European trilogy.
Certainly there does seem to be a trend amongst insecure monarchs and dictators eager to accurately audit their domain, and identify the neighbouring realms that desperately need to be liberated from their current owners / occupants.
That may be true for people looking for conquest.
Wars can also be waged over resources when you’re running out of them (like a growing pop or your land has become infertile, etc.)
That quote trivializes things a bit. Kings couldn’t go to war just because. They’d have to get general agreement from lots of stakeholders, else they hold the bag.
OTOH for something like this to have been constructed ~3800 years ago suggests that it was probably the product of a more sophisticated kingdom than a couple of sheep herders would have had either the means or inclination to construct.
That it has survived this long - well, maybe a bias, but also may indicate that it was well cared for, and stored away carefully at some point, such that it survived the next few millennia.
Not everything made during the Bronze Age was made out of bronze.
Case in point, as described in the article, this artefact was made of rock.
Still, a rock slab map is a considerable investment in creating time, and remains relatively stable over time - so the basic argument still stands.
or just to know where they can and can't levy taxes. Or go hunting without impinging on a neighbor's land. Or cutting trees, digging a quarry or a mine and so on