The history of cartography in the ancient world is a history of how different civilizations thought about space, territory, and the relationship between geographical knowledge and political power.

Babylonian clay tablets preserve what appear to be the oldest maps — schematic representations of the known world with Babylon at the center, surrounded by ocean, with distant lands shown at the edges. These are cosmological diagrams as much as geographical maps.

Greek cartography moved toward systematic geographical description. Hecataeus of Miletus in the 6th century BC produced a map of the world accompanied by a geographical text. Eratosthenes in the 3rd century BC not only calculated the earth's circumference but produced a more accurate world map based on systematic observations of latitude and longitude.

Ptolemy's Geography (2nd century AD) is the culmination of ancient cartographic thought: a mathematical framework for projecting a sphere onto a flat surface, with coordinate tables for thousands of locations. It was rediscovered in Western Europe in the 15th century just in time to provide the intellectual framework for the Age of Exploration — and its errors about the size of Asia were partly responsible for Columbus's confidence that he could reach the East by sailing west.