Navigation is a fundamental human interest. The urge to explore motivated humankind to depict the environment and in doing so, invented what became known as the map. Perhaps the fear of being lost also stretches back to our earliest times.

The oldest known map is a small clay tablet portraying the layout of an estate created in late 3000 BC in Sumeria. Thus, creating maps was also driven by pragmatism as demonstrated by Egyptian society in 1400 BC. The Egyptians made maps showing the boundaries of properties for the purpose of levying taxes. The boundary markers were washed away during the annual flooding of the Nile.

The further afield ancient explorers wandered necessitated the making of maps. Some of them, those created by early Greeks--Strabo and Ptolemy in particular--depicted the known world view. Ptolemy, for instance, produced a mapping textbook, Geographica, that included map projections. This volume was discovered by Renaissance scholars some 1000 years after it was created and profoundly affected mapmaking and the field of cartography for centuries.

Maps then are a means of organizing information or data, the main purpose of which is to navigate the environment. Most often, the navigation is physical but the "journey" may be spiritual, imaginative or contrived out of fantasy. Today too, we also navigate electronic environments through computer databases, CD-ROMs and the Internet. Well before the advent of computer technology (and even, the printing press) early maps also constituted a highly regarded art form. As children we learn to make a mental map of the route home from school before learning how to read. We note the identifying landmarks and tuck them away for later. The notion of "personal navigation" is thus intuitive as long as the terrain remains friendly and familiar. Once we stray further afield, then a map comes in very handy indeed.