Why is North up?

[Sam Slater]

So it's you who's been sending me those pictures!

[jj]

Good, aren't they?

[alec]

A further point of interest to a historian. I think some medieval maps had Jerusalem at the centre, or, if maps of the then known world - roughly around the Mediterranean, they were orientated so that Jerusalem was near the bottom of the page so that West was at the top.

And an aside on irritating language / geographical illiteracy - the term 'wide scale' sets my teeth on edge. You can have a large scale or a wide range, but a 'wide scale' implies a gross distortion in one direction but not the other, like the old world maps which used the Mercator projection and thus exaggerated the size of areas near the poles (and hence, because that included Canada, the size of the British Empire).

[jj]

alec wrote:
> A further point of interest to a historian. I think some
> medieval maps had Jerusalem at the centre
Mappa mundi, for example. Earlier maps had Rome at the centre.