Read a Road Map Day

And if you think that ancient maps were nothing like our maps, you should really take a look at the Turn Papyrus Map, which was a map of Egypt created around 1160 BCE. It's widely considered the first road map, because it actually shows where people could travel around river bends. And by the 12th century CE, maps had developed into what experts consider "modern maps."

The world we're most familiar with is the Mercator projection, which was invented in the mid 16th century by a cartographer named Gerardus Mercator. Another interesting thing about maps is that they always have different projections, because the Earth is round and maps are flat, so there's no such thing as a perfectly accurate map of the world.