How is euro centrism affecting map making!

The earliest known map is a matter of some debate, both because the definition of "map" is not sharp and because some artifacts speculated to be maps might actually be something else. A wall painting, which may depict the ancient Anatolian city of atalhyk, has been dated to the late 7th millennium BCE. technology has continually changed in order to meet the demands of new generations of mapmakers and map users. The first maps were manually constructed with brushes and parchment; therefore, varied in quality and were limited in distribution. The advent of magnetic devices, such as the compass and much later, magnetic storage devices allowed for the creation of far more accurate maps and the ability to store and manipulate them digitally Unlike the garden variety of ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism emerged as an ideological project shaped by Europes intellectual elites in the service of Europes growing expansionist drive, starting in the sixteenth century. It makes sweeping claims of European superiority in all spheres of civilization. In this worldview, only Europeans have created history over the past three thousand years, beginning with the ancient Greeks. In various accounts, this centrality is ascribed to race, culture, religion and geography. Eurocentrism demanded that cartography place Europe at the top of the world. This was easily accomplished by orienting the globe so that the North appeared at the top of the globe, or, in the case of maps, at the top of the page. It is always a source of some confusion for my students when I hang the map of the world upside down so that the North goes at the bottom. It is a bit unsettling to learn that there is no logic nothing natural about the North-at-the-top globes and maps. World maps were not everywhere drawn with the North-at-the top orientation. The Muslims in their heyday when their empires stretched from Spain to Khurasan and India were making world maps, which placed the South at the top, even though this placed Africa above the central Islimicate lands stretching from the Nile to the Oxus. In their case, perhaps, orientation of the maps did not matter as much, since they always came out at the center. In addition, Europeans gave currency to world maps that used Mercators cylindrical projection. Was this choice accidental? Admittedly, the Mercator map was useful for mariners, since a line connecting two points on this map showed the true direction. But are we to believe that sea captains had an interest in and the power as well - to impose maps useful to them on the rest of society? More credibly, the Mercator maps were chosen because they greatly exaggerated the size of Europe, making it as large as, or larger than, Africa. Incredibly, some Mercator maps published in the United States engage in cartographic violence. In order to center the United States on their maps, the publishers are quite happy to tear Asia right down the middle, pushing its two halves to the left and right edges of the map. It matters little that this sundering of Asia greatly diminishes the cartographic value of this truncated map of the world. This quite nicely illustrates the first casualty of Eurocentrism its disregard for reality, and its willingness to engage in epistemological violence in order to place Europe at the center of the world