North is at the top of most maps by convention, not because of any law of physics: the Earth has no up or down in space, and a map turned upside down is just as accurate. The habit is European, and it took hold in the 16th century with printed north-up world maps such as Gerardus Mercator’s 1569 chart, built for navigators steering by the magnetic compass. Before that, mapmakers chose whatever direction mattered most to them. Medieval Christian maps like the Hereford Mappa Mundi put east at the top, towards the rising sun and the Garden of Eden; Arab geographers such as al-Idrisi, and Han-dynasty Chinese mapmakers, often put south at the top. Six places, from an English cathedral to an Apollo spacecraft, show how the choice was made.
Hereford Cathedral, England: East at the Top of the Mappa Mundi
An everyday English word holds the clue. To “orient” yourself comes from the Latin oriens, meaning east, literally “rising”, because that is where the sun comes up. For much of the Middle Ages, east really was up on European world maps, and the largest surviving example is displayed at Hereford Cathedral in the west of England.
The Hereford Mappa Mundi, made around 1300, is the largest medieval map known still to exist. It is drawn on a single sheet of vellum measuring 158 by 133 cm, with a circular world about 130 cm across. Its layout follows the medieval T-and-O pattern: a circle of land surrounded by ocean, split into Asia, Europe and Africa by a T of waterways formed by the Mediterranean, the Don and the Nile, with the Mediterranean running up from the bottom of the map. The labels for Africa and Europe are swapped. Jerusalem sits at the centre, the Garden of Eden is drawn in a circle at the eastern rim, and above everything is the Last Judgement. Great Britain is squeezed in at the bottom left edge.
The map was never meant for travel. It depicts some 420 towns alongside 15 Biblical events, 33 animals and plants and five scenes from classical mythology, and one theory holds that it was made as a focus for pilgrims visiting the shrine of Thomas de Cantilupe in the cathedral. Its orientation is theological: the viewer looks towards Paradise and Christ in judgement. UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World register in 2007. A larger map of the same type, the Ebstorf Map in Germany, was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943.
Changsha, China: The Mawangdui Silk Maps With South at the Top
Chinese cartography shows that orientation could flip within a single culture. In 1986 archaeologists found maps from the Qin State dating to the 4th century BC that place north at the top. But the three maps drawn on silk and buried in Tomb 3 at Mawangdui, near Changsha in Hunan, in 168 BC, are oriented with south at the top.
The Mawangdui maps, a topographic map, a military map and a prefecture map, cover parts of today’s Hunan, Guangdong and Guangxi and mark the frontier between the Han dynasty and the kingdom of Nanyue. They are more sophisticated than the Qin maps, with standardised symbols, measured distances between places and notes on garrisons and population. Chinese and Islamic map traditions both tended to treat south as the proper top. The first Chinese magnetic devices were named the same way: in the 2nd century BC, geomancers experimented with lodestone to make a “south-pointing spoon” for divination, which turned to a north–south axis when placed on a smooth bronze plate.
Palermo, Sicily: Al-Idrisi’s South-Up Atlas for King Roger II
One of the most accurate world maps of the Middle Ages was also upside down by modern standards. Around 1138 the Norman king of Sicily, Roger II, invited the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi to his court in Palermo and commissioned an atlas of the known world. Al-Idrisi interviewed travellers, sent agents to check their accounts, and worked for some 15 years.
The result, completed in 1154, a few weeks before Roger died, was the Nuzhat al-mushtaq, known in Latin as the Tabula Rogeriana. It divides the world into seven climatic zones, following Ptolemy, each split into ten sections, for 70 maps in all. Every one of them has south at the top and north at the bottom, with Mecca in the middle of the composite world. A circular world map in later copies shows the same orientation. Al-Idrisi also engraved the composite map on a silver disc weighing about 140 kg, now lost, and estimated the circumference of the Earth at 37,000 km, within 10% of the true figure.
Many Islamic maps put south at the top, and the convention lasted for centuries: the scholar Sadiq Isfahani of Jaunpur, in India, compiled a 32-sheet atlas in 1647 with its maps oriented towards the south “as was the case with Islamic works of the era”.
Venice: Fra Mauro’s Planisphere Keeps South Up but Drops Jerusalem
Even in Christian Europe, north-up was not automatic in the mid-15th century. Around 1450 the Camaldolese monk Fra Mauro, working on the island of Murano near Venice, produced a world map for the rulers of Venice and Portugal, two of the great seafaring powers of the age. Its gilded frame measures 2.4 by 2.4 metres, making it the largest surviving map from early modern Europe, and it carries more than 3,000 descriptive texts.
Fra Mauro put south at the top, as Arab geographers such as al-Idrisi had; one explanation offered is that 15th-century compasses were thought of as south-pointing. Yet his map was a break with the past in other ways. He did not place Jerusalem at the centre, and he moved the Garden of Eden outside the world altogether, into a separate roundel in a corner of the frame, rather than at the eastern edge. The historian Jerry Brotton has called it the beginning of the end of the biblical mappae mundi. The map is normally on display in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice. Little more than a century after its completion, the most influential European world map would be drawn the other way up.
Duisburg: Mercator’s 1569 Chart and the Compass Needle
The map that did most to fix north at the top was printed in Duisburg, the German city where the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator lived from 1552 until his death in 1594. His 1569 world map, “adapted for use in navigation”, was engraved on 18 copper plates; assembled, it measures 202 by 124 cm. Its top row of six sheets covers latitudes from 80°N down to 56°N, so the Arctic is at the top and the southern oceans at the bottom.
The science behind it was the magnetic compass. Mercator’s projection draws lines of constant compass bearing, called rhumb lines, as straight lines, so a navigator could lay a ruler between two ports and read off a single heading. Since the 1375 Catalan Atlas, European sea charts had carried compass roses, and bearings were measured from north: 0° north, 90° east, 180° south, 270° west. A chart that put north at the top matched the needle and the numbers. By the 18th century the Mercator projection had become the standard for navigation, and its north-up layout went with it into atlases, schoolrooms and, eventually, online maps. Our guide to the Mercator projection explains why it also inflates Greenland and Antarctica.
The sky offered a second reason. Polaris, the North Star, lies less than 1° from the north celestial pole, and the whole night sky appears to turn around it. For astronomers in the Northern Hemisphere, where most European and Arab mapmakers lived, a fixed point in the northern sky made a natural “up”. The Southern Hemisphere has no bright pole star to match. Once the layout was established, it reinforced itself, as new maps were drawn to match the ones readers already knew. The wider story of how mapping traditions merged is told in our history of cartography.
Uruguay, Australia and Apollo 17: South-Up Maps Strike Back
By the 20th century north-up was so universal that turning a map over became a political statement. In 1943 the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García drew América Invertida, an upside-down South America, to assert the importance of his continent. In 1979 a 21-year-old Australian, Stuart McArthur, published McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World, with south at the top and Australia prominent near the top, after being taunted as an exchange student for coming from “Down Under”.
Psychologists have since found that the convention shapes how people think. In studies, people tend to associate north with wealth, expensive property and higher altitude, and south with the opposite; when participants were shown south-up maps, the bias disappeared. English idioms such as “up north” and “down south” show how deeply map layout has seeped into language.
One of the most widely reproduced pictures of the Earth makes the same point. On 7 December 1972 the crew of Apollo 17, about 29,400 km from Earth on their way to the Moon, photographed the whole sunlit planet, from the Mediterranean to the Antarctic ice cap. In the original frame, numbered AS17-148-22727, the South Pole faced upwards, the way the astronauts saw it. The version published around the world was cropped, colour-adjusted and rotated so that north was at the top, matching the convention on maps and globes.
That rotation sums up the whole history. Hereford put Paradise at the top, Palermo and Changsha put south there, and Duisburg settled on north because the compass and the pole star pointed that way. None of them was wrong. If you want to practise reading directions on any map, whichever way up, our guide to compass directions starts with the basics.