The World Map: How It Was Made and Who Decides Its Borders

From a Clay Disc to a Satellite in Orbit

A world map looks like a stable object, almost a given. Every version ever drawn actually tells two things at once, how much was known about the planet at the moment it was made, and who had the power to decide what to call a place and where to draw its border. The story starts with a clay disc in Mesopotamia and reaches, by way of a Renaissance printing press and the United Nations, all the way to satellites that have been photographing the Earth for over half a century.

A Tablet Tells the World

The oldest known world map is a clay tablet incised in cuneiform script, dated between 700 and 500 BCE and unearthed at Sippar, in what is now southern Iraq. The British archaeologist Hormuzd Rassam discovered it in 1881; it is held at the British Museum in London, and measures a mere 12.2 by 8.2 centimeters.

Babylon sits at the center of the tablet. Around it appear other places familiar to Babylonian scribes, such as Assyria and Elam, and the whole area is ringed by a circular waterway known as the Bitter River. Strictly speaking, it is not a geographic map, its purpose was to explain the Babylonians’ mythological view of the world, not to help anyone find their way from one place to another.

Mercator, 1569: The Map That Still Navigates

More than two thousand years pass before the next leap, the one that made precise long-distance navigation possible.

In 1569 the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594) published a map with a sprawling title, “Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigantium Emendate Accommodata,” roughly a representation of the globe corrected specifically for the use of sailors. It was printed on 18 separate sheets, each 33 by 40 centimeters, which assembled together reached 202 by 124 centimeters overall.

The innovation lies in how a spherical Earth gets flattened onto a sheet. Mercator drew meridians parallel to one another and parallels at right angles to the meridians, with the spacing between parallels widening the closer they get to the poles. That technical choice has an enormous practical consequence, it lets sailors plot navigation routes, known as rhumb lines, as straight lines on a flat chart.

Practical example: a captain who needs to hold a constant compass heading, say west-southwest, actually follows a slightly curved path on a three-dimensional globe. On the Mercator projection that same route becomes a straight line, traceable with a ruler, which is why the projection still underlies nautical charts.

Mercator’s map fuses two traditions that had stayed separate until then, theoretical world maps, meant to represent geographic knowledge, and the practical nautical charts sailors passed down to find their way at sea. It is also among the earliest maps to use the names “North America” and “South America” for the two continents.

Era	Period	Innovation	Main purpose
Babylonian tablet	700-500 BCE	Etched into clay	Represent a worldview
Mercator projection	1569	Rhumb lines as straight lines	Guide navigation
Landsat program	since 1972	Continuous satellite observation	Monitor territory and borders

Who Admits a New State, and Who Actually Recognizes It

The twentieth century rewrote the political map more than once, and not gently, World War 1 brought down the multinational central empires that had dominated Europe and the Near East, while World War 2 redrew borders again and led, in 1945, to the founding of the United Nations, the organization that has kept the official list of the world’s states ever since.

When a new state is born, though, the UN doesn’t “recognize” it in a formal legal sense, it admits it as a member, through a precise two-step procedure. The Security Council recommends admission, then the General Assembly adopts a resolution that makes it effective. Recognition of one state by another, by contrast, remains a bilateral political act, each country decides on its own whether and when to recognize another, regardless of that country’s admission to the United Nations.

Practical example: when a new state joins the UN, its place on the official list is secured by a General Assembly vote. That doesn’t mean every other country on the planet recognizes it automatically, bilateral recognition is a separate political decision that each state makes on its own, and it can come before, after, or never at all.

The most complete example of this procedure is South Sudan. On July 13, 2011, the Security Council recommended admission; the next day, July 14, 2011, the General Assembly adopted the resolution by acclamation, and South Sudan became the 193rd member state of the United Nations. The country had declared independence on July 9, 2011, after a referendum held that January under the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which had ended the civil war between North and South Sudan. Five years earlier, on June 28, 2006, Montenegro had become the 192nd member.

A new border is never entirely without precedent in history. In the nineteenth century it was the Italian unification that redrew the peninsula, merging pre-existing states into a single kingdom; in the twentieth century it was South Sudan’s turn, among others. Not every border, though, is born from a negotiated process with this much clarity, the line splitting the two Koreas was drawn along the 38th parallel under very different circumstances, without a UN pathway comparable to South Sudan’s.

Who Decides the Names on the Map

Admitting a state is one thing, deciding what it’s called, in every language and on every world map, is a different and ongoing job. That falls to UNGEGN, the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, one of nine expert groups under the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The group first met in 1960 in New York and held its official conference in 1967 in Geneva; in August and September 1977 the Third United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, in Athens, launched the compilation of shared toponymic guidelines.

UNGEGN’s structure includes a Bureau, 24 geographic and linguistic divisions, and 9 thematic working groups, and its stated goal is not to impose names from above, it is for each country to decide its own official names through a national authority or a recognized administrative process. The conference is held every five years; the eleventh edition took place in August 2017 in New York, and the next is set for April 26-30, 2027, again at United Nations headquarters.

Two Different Ways to Change the Map

Not every change to the political map is the same, and a recent example helps distinguish them from an older case like South Sudan’s.

On June 26, 2026, Nauru formally notified the United Nations of its own name change to the Republic of Naoero. The path had begun months earlier, President David Adeang had put forward the proposal in January 2026, parliament had approved it unanimously in May, with official certification on May 13, 2026, and the wider public announcement came on July 30, 2026. The stated reason concerned the country’s heritage, language and identity, the name Naoero already appeared on the national coat of arms and was in local use; no referendum was held. What changed were the official designation, “Republic of Naoero,” the short form, “Naoero,” and the international code, updated to “NRO,” what stayed the same were the border, the territory and the seat at the United Nations.

South Sudan’s case, described above, differs in substance, in 2011 it wasn’t a name change to an existing state, a new one was born, with a new border drawn against Sudan. Confusing the two kinds of event, a change of name and the birth of a new state, is one of the most common mistakes when reading a piece of political geography news.

The View From Orbit

Another great shift in cartography doesn’t concern borders themselves, but the way of observing them. On July 23, 1972, the United States launched from Vandenberg, California, the first satellite of the Landsat program, originally named ERTS (Earth Resources Technology Satellite), the first satellite designed explicitly to study the planet, jointly run by NASA and the USGS, the United States Geological Survey. Its main sensor, the Multispectral Scanner, was designed by engineer Virginia Norwood, remembered as the “Mother of Landsat.”

Since that launch the program hasn’t stopped, it has become the longest-running satellite Earth observation program, with a continuous image archive spanning over 50 years and eight successfully launched satellites. The data it produces serves those who manage territory, for monitoring land use and tracking how landscapes, coastlines and borders that once could only be measured from the ground change over time.