Before Graphics: Topographic Lists as Religiously Informed Spatial Maps

Before the advent of cartography, maps in the form of topographic lists were utilized by the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations to convey a religiously based understanding of the world. Texts, such as Akkadian and Egyptian campaign texts, elucidate land taken by a king on behalf of their deity, and thereby understood as created and owned by said deity. Other texts, such as those in the Hebrew Bible and Greek genealogical texts, display mythic elements interwoven into an understanding of the land as divinely given, and, in some cases, then requiring it to be reclaimed from other deities. This paper will summarize the religious ideology displayed in geographic lists before the advent of cartography as the first “maps,” and then analyze how their theology was maintained and shaped in the development of their maps as cosmological depictions of the divine realm.