Jay Foreman

Well, that's interesting because New Zealand goes missing from maps a lot, but then again, so do plenty of other places.

So nations that go missing as well as New Zealand include Iceland, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, the Caribbean, and a lot of maps forget Antarctica completely.

Well, it's really spectacular.

It depends how far back in history you go, because if you go back a thousand years to the first Ptolemaic maps, they were the first maps that were attempting to be accurate, but without any of the kind of technology or data that we have now.

And it was mostly just guesswork, just sort of walking around and doing the best straight lines possible.

But it's when they started to use trigonometry, when they started to use instruments that can very, very accurately measure angles towards points a long distance away, that you can start to build up an accurate map.

It's important to remember that for the majority of civilization, accuracy was not the main priority in maps.

Maps that circulated for many hundreds of years were primarily works of art to go in the monarch's office just so they could see what they were king of, and they were decorative.

And it's only really quite recently that maps have become a scientific tool.

But what it goes to show is just what an amazing job these people did hundreds of years ago, how much harder it was and how we take it for granted.

The very first map that we know of was a map of Babylon, which is from about 9000 BC.

And it took quite a long time for archaeologists to work out that it actually was a map they were looking at, because I think map is quite a generous term for it.

It was a sort of clay map.

Yeah, so there's rather a lot missing from that map.

I would imagine.

That's why it took them such a long time to work out that it was supposed to be a world map.

Well, exactly.

I mean, the only map, if you think about it, the only map that could possibly be truly accurate is a map that's of a scale of 1 to 1 and includes every single possible detail, and that's a very limited use.

A map, by definition, has to distort the world in some way.

If a map's job is to make something easy to understand and easy to read,