Name: Muslims • Maps of different Time
Name: Iqra javaid Department: Microbiology Registration number: 04051713037 Course: Islamiat studies/ ethics Assignment no: 1 Assignment topic: Map making and Kaaba as center of earth Outlines: • Map making • Steps for constructing map • Early map making by Muslims • Maps of different Time period • Map projections and directions • Conclusion A map is a symbolic description highlighting connections between basics of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes. Cartography is a term used for the study and practice of making maps. There are many different types of maps.
One of them is a geological map. A geologic map or geological map is a special-purpose map made to show geological features. Geological map shows not only the surface, but characteristics of the underlying rock, fault lines, and subsurface structures.
Among all maps the best is world map. A world map is a map of most or all of the surface of the Earth. World maps form a distinctive category of maps due to the problem of plot. The first maps were made by hand, by paint on a parchment paper. But now scientific techniques are used for making a map. Map-making is very old, and has been practiced by the most primitive peoples for many ages. In South America, rude scratches on many rocks are now interpreted as maps.
East Greenland natives carve maps out of wood; American Indians make map-sketches on birch and other barks; the Marshall Islanders recorded the sailing routes along their coasts long before they knew of the white man; the desert nomad sketches maps in the sand to illustrate his wanderings, and nearly every primitive had did that. A map is made using a map projection, which is a method of representing a globe on a plane. All projections change distances and directions, and each projection allots those distortions differently.
The most important projection is the Mercator projection. This projection is represented by two models. One is spherical and other is cylindrical model. A number of previous Greek philosophers presumed the earth to be spherical, Aristotle (384–322 BC) is the one to be ascribed with provingthe Earth’s sphericity. Whereas map projection is a systematic transformation of the latitudes and longitudes of locations from the surface of a sphere or an ellipsoid into locations on the plane. Maps cannot be created without map projections. The earliest known world maps date to classical ancient times, the oldest examples of the 6th to 5th centuries BCE still based on the flat Earth paradigm.
Anaximander (died c. 546 BCE) is credited with having created one of the first maps of the world, which was circular in form and showed the known lands of the world grouped around the Aegean Sea at the center. This was all surrounded by the ocean.
According to him the earth was centered by the cosmological material only. As early as the 8th century, Arab scholars were translating the works of the Greek geographers into Arabic. The Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi produced his medieval atlas Tabula Rogeriana in 1154. He incorporated the knowledge of Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Far East, gathered by Arab merchants and explorers with the information inherited from the classical geographers to create the most accurate map of the world up until his time. It remained the most accurate world map for the next three centuries. In the Age of Exploration, from the 15th century to the 17th century, European cartographers have copied the ancient maps and using different tools and techniques like magnetic compass and telescope etc altered the whole world map. North, South, East, and West are the four main “cardinal” directions.
On a map, North is at the top, South at the bottom, West to the left, and East to the right. Every map has a Map Scale which relates distance on the map to the world. For example, one inch equals one mile.
Using the scale of a map, you can tell the actual distance between two points for real. Maps use map symbols to represent real-world things, such as buildings, trails, roads, bridges, and rivers. Maps use colors to share more information. Blue often means water, green means forest, and white means bare land. A map has a Legend which lists the symbols it uses and what they mean. A grid of imaginary lines wrap around and over the earth. These lines are called Latitude and Longitude and can identify the exact location of any point on earth.
A surface that can be unfolded or unrolled into a plane or sheet without stretching, tearing or shrinking is called a developable surface. The cylinder, cone and the plane are all developable surfaces. The sphere and ellipsoid do not have developable surfaces, so any projection of them onto a plane will have to distort the image. One way of describing a projection is first to project from the Earth’s surface to a developable surface such as a cylinder or cone, and then to unroll the surfaceinto a plane.
While the first step certainly distorts some properties of the globe, the developable surface can then be unfolded without further. relative to the globe: it may be normal (such that the surface’s axis of symmetry coincides with the Earth’s axis), transverse (at right angles to the Earth’s axis) or oblique (any angle in between). The developable surface may also be either tangent or secant to the sphere or ellipsoid.
The projections are described in terms of placing a gigantic surface in contact with the earth, followed by an implied scaling operation. These surfaces are cylindrical (e.g. Mercator), conic (e.g. Albers), and plane (e.
g. stereographic). According to above mentioned paragraph, earth is neither oval nor flat its elliptical.
Which shows that its direction can not be centered and moreover its rotation on its own axis changes within 24 hrs which causes change of direction of all places. So Kaaba’s direction remained questioned because of different projections but the direction towards the Kaaba is almost done by an Arab company by the mechanism of circle radius. A circle was drawn and whole part was considered as 360 degrees equivalent but later own it was superimposed on the globe which changed the direction and projections according to new technique.