A little fact from your first link that I found interesting:
"Throughout most of the middle ages, maps were drawn with East at the top, rather than North. (This is how the word "orient" came to mean "face the correct direction.") A fantasy map that followed this convention would be bottom-justified, instead of left-justified."
Makes sense from a map-user's perspective. Open your map in the morning, orient the map towards the sun, choose direction, put away map, travel for the day.
Idk about that. Magnets have been known for a very long time, and if you know that magnets always point north and the world is a sphere (which was known in classical antiquity.) it's pretty easy to put the two together and know that there must be a magnetic pole.
I still think it's wild that some guy worked out the circumference of the earth thousands of years ago using two sticks and some trigonometry. I think he was right to within a few hundred miles.
A little fact from your first link that I found interesting:
"Throughout most of the middle ages, maps were drawn with East at the top, rather than North. (This is how the word "orient" came to mean "face the correct direction.") A fantasy map that followed this convention would be bottom-justified, instead of left-justified."
Makes sense from a map-user's perspective. Open your map in the morning, orient the map towards the sun, choose direction, put away map, travel for the day.
:galaxy-brain:
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Idk about that. Magnets have been known for a very long time, and if you know that magnets always point north and the world is a sphere (which was known in classical antiquity.) it's pretty easy to put the two together and know that there must be a magnetic pole.
I still think it's wild that some guy worked out the circumference of the earth thousands of years ago using two sticks and some trigonometry. I think he was right to within a few hundred miles.
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