When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.***Why do maps show north as being up? Anyone who’s bothered to ask has probably gotten a simple answer: “Because Europeans made the maps, and they wanted to be on top.” As a result, the upside-down map has become a popular symbol for rejecting Eurocentrism in college classrooms across the country.Ironically, though, this convenient explanation doubles down on the bias it claims to combat. Blaming Europeans for the orientation of our maps assumes they were the ones who single-handedly decided which way to orient them, thereby exaggerating their role in creating, or at least depicting, our world. It turns out no one actually knows why north ended up on top of the map. But the available evidence suggests it has as much to do with Byzantine monks and Majorcan Jews as it does with any Englishman.The history of map orientation is rife with uncertainty, and wading into it can be maddening. I recently bought a book called Why North Is Up, hoping for a clear answer. But all I found was a paragraph of speculation that seemed to be taken from a sometimes-inaccessible article I wrote years ago where I speculated about some of the speculation I’d read in other books.Everyone seems to agree that mapmakers in ancient Egypt put south up, possibly because they thought the Nile flowed down. Early Chinese mapmakers put south up as well, and also viewed compasses as pointing south.So far, so good.A 1456 copy of Arab Sicilian cartographer al-Idrisi’s 1154 world map.Medieval Arab mapmakers, whose work would directly shape European cartography,