ABSTRACT
China is Asia's oldest civilisation, and the centre from which cultural disciplines spread to the rest of the continent. She can also claim primacy in cartography. The Chinese anticipated the peoples of the West in knowledge of the compass, said to be invented in 1100 B.C., the gnomon and the water-level, and they understood the science of levelling. Korean cartography is nowhere original, but follows Chinese models and Chinese methods. It remains to be said that Persian cartography, at first wholly under Arab influence, seems to have ceased altogether, at least in the production of land-maps, with the decline of Arab power. As the heir of both Arab and Byzantine cultures, the Turkish Empire had a rich cartographic tradition behind it. The first known product of Turkish cartography, dating from the time when the Turks were in Central Asia, is an unusual and original circular world map included by Mahmud al-Kashgari in his Turkis dictionary.
