There She Blew! Volcanic Evidence Of The World's First Map
A new study of volcanic rocks suggests that an ancient mural may indeed depict an erupting volcano, adding new weight to a theory that this image is a contender for the world's oldest known landscape painting or map.
The mural was found at a vast archaeological site in central Turkey known as Catalhoyuk. This Neolithic town goes back 9,000 years and was a huge settlement for a time when people were first transitioning from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. Thousands of people lived there in mud-brick houses that were crammed together like honeycombs.
In the 1960's, British archaeologist James Mellaart said that one mural showed the eruption of a volcano with two peaks — just like the one that lies about 80 miles away. In the mural, the volcano looms over what looks to be a bird's-eye view of the settlement's houses, laid out like a kind of schematic plan. This mural has often been called the world's oldest known map.
"In volcano textbooks or textbooks about cartography and mapping, they would always in their introduction mention this mural and that it's potentially the oldest map, and the oldest depiction of a volcanic eruption," says Axel Schmitt, a geologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies volcanoes.
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