For centuries, the world has been hanging on classroom walls in a shape most people rarely questioned. Europe sits comfortably near the centre. Greenland looks enormous. Africa, despite being the second-largest continent and larger than the United States, China, India and much of Europe combined, appears strangely diminished.
Now, the United Nations (UN) wants people to look again. On 4 September, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly backed a resolution calling for more accurate and equitable representations of the world’s regions. The initiative, led by Togo and supported by African states, received 164 votes in favour, six abstentions and one against.
It does not ban the familiar Mercator projection, nor does it legally force countries to use a particular alternative. But it has given new momentum to maps such as Equal Earth, which preserves the relative area of continents far more faithfully. The political argument surrounding the decision is important. But beneath it lies an older and more fascinating question: what exactly is a map?
It is tempting to think of a map as a neutral picture of reality. It is not. Every map is a decision about what to show, what to leave out, what to place at the centre and what to make larger or smaller. And those decisions have changed as humanity’s understanding of the world has changed.
The story begins thousands of years ago. One of the oldest surviving world maps is the Babylonian Map of the World, a clay tablet dating to around the sixth century BCE. Babylon sits at its centre, surrounded by a circular body of water and a series of distant regions. It was not a satellite-accurate representation of Earth. It reflected something equally important: how the Babylonians imagined their world.
The earliest maps were therefore not simply instruments of navigation. They were expressions of knowledge, belief and power. As civilisations grew, so did the ambition of their cartographers. Greek thinkers began treating geography more scientifically.
Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy for his time. Ptolemy later developed a system of coordinates that would influence cartography for centuries.
But the history of maps did not belong to Europe alone. In the medieval Islamic world, geography flourished through the movement of scholars, merchants and travellers. One of its greatest achievements came from Muhammad al-Idrisi, who produced an extraordinary geographical work in 1154 for the Norman king Roger II of Sicily.
Al-Idrisi combined Greek knowledge with Arabic sources, travellers’ accounts and firsthand information. His work was divided into 70 sectional maps that, when assembled, formed a vast representation of the known world. And it looked unfamiliar to modern eyes: south was placed at the top and north at the bottom.
That detail is revealing. We often assume that north belongs at the top because that is how maps have taught us to see the world. But there is nothing inherently “up” about north.
A map can change simply because the person drawing it changes. Then came the great European voyages of the 15th and 16th centuries. Ships crossed oceans, new coastlines were recorded and Europe’s geographic imagination expanded rapidly. Maps became essential to navigation, trade and imperial competition.
This was when cartography became intertwined with power on an unprecedented scale.
In 1569, Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator published the world map that would eventually become one of the most influential maps in history. His projection solved an important practical problem: it allowed sailors to plot courses using straight lines. For navigation, it was enormously useful.
But the solution came with a price. The Mercator projection dramatically enlarges areas as they move towards the poles. Greenland consequently appears comparable in size to Africa, although Africa is roughly 14 times larger. Europe and other northern regions also appear much larger relative to equatorial regions than they are in reality.
Mercator himself did not design the projection to make Europe look powerful. It was designed for navigation. Yet maps rarely remain confined to their original purpose.
As European empires expanded, maps became instruments of administration and territorial control. Surveyors measured land, borders were drawn, resources were catalogued, and territories were divided. In colonial South Asia, Africa and elsewhere, cartography became part of the machinery through which distant powers understood, governed and claimed territory.
A line on paper could become a border on the ground. A century later, the world entered another cartographic revolution. Aerial photography changed how landscapes could be observed. Satellites transformed mapping again. Geographic information systems turned maps into enormous databases capable of displaying population, disease, rainfall, roads, forests, pollution and migration.
Then came GPS and smartphones. Today, most people carry a map more powerful than anything an ancient emperor could have imagined. A phone can locate a person within metres, calculate a route across a city and display satellite imagery almost instantly.
Yet the fundamental problem remains. A map is still a representation, not the Earth itself. That is why the current argument over Equal Earth matters. Developed in 2018 by cartographers Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, and Bernhard Jenny, Equal Earth is an equal-area projection. It was designed to retain the relative sizes of landmasses while maintaining a visually familiar world-map appearance.
It does not make every geographical feature perfect. No flat map can. The Earth is three-dimensional, while a conventional world map is not. Every projection involves compromises involving area, shape, distance or direction.
For a child who grows up seeing Greenland and Africa appearing almost comparable, geography can become an unconscious lesson in proportion. For a policymaker examining climate vulnerability, a distorted map can affect how information is visually understood.
For countries that spent generations being represented through maps created during the age of empire, changing the visual language can also carry symbolic weight. Perhaps that is why the argument has become so heated. Humanity has been drawing maps for thousands of years because we have always wanted to answer the same question: where are we?
The Babylonian who pressed a map into clay, the scholar who assembled al-Idrisi’s world, the navigator following a Mercator chart and the modern user opening Google Maps are separated by centuries of technology and knowledge.
Yet they are doing essentially the same thing. They are turning an enormous, complicated world into something the human mind can see. Perhaps the most important lesson of the new map is that we should never mistake that picture for the world itself.
Maps do not merely show us where we are. They teach us how to see where we are.
