Cartography, from the Greek word khartes meaning 'map' and graphein meaning 'write', , is a science that is at its simplest level the study and practice of making maps. At a more sophisticated level, it is not just a science, but an art that seeks to give in a simple and beautiful form, to the spatial information in the human environment. Cartography, along with science and aesthetics, obviously involves technical expertise, which has been developing over millennia.

Historically, maps have sought to utilise the complex knowledge of the environment, innate in the majority of the human race, to suit the needs of people who seek to use them. Communities living in small groups and not travelling very far have little need of complex maps, while urban dwellers, seafarers or traders operating in a much more complex and/or wider environment need something more sophisticated, either to delineate boundaries and define ownership, or to travel routes beyond the immediate confines of their communities. As humanity's needs have changed and the world they encountered has changed, so have the maps they need to shape or navigate that world.

What exactly constitutes a map has made the identification of the first maps not easy. Early dot maps of the night sky from the 17,000 BC have been found in caves at Lascaux in France, but even earlier representations of mountains and routes dated to 25,000 BC have been identified in the Czech Republic. At present-day Catalhuyuk in Anatolia, an aerial map like plan of the town has been dated to about 7,000 years BC, while at Valcamonica in the Italian Alps, examples of images date to the 4th millennium BC.

The primary function of the creation of maps is to locate the place of humanity in their world and to guide. Drawings of totemic ancestors, such as crocodiles or birds, and their actions, have been made on bark and cave walls by Australian Aboriginals, as well as through songs and rituals, to act as maps to help guide souls through the world in Dream Time. In the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean are found stick charts, which give an idea of what maps in ancient times might have looked like. The charts are memory aids showing the swells of the ocean that were studied and learnt prior to a sea voyage. They recorded different features from today's maps, but nonetheless their contribution to cartography is not insignificant.

In Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq, ancient clay tablets dating back as far as the 3rd Century BC have been found depicting estates and, at times, cities such as Nippur, south of Babylon, with marking for irrigation channels, a river and estate boundaries. These tablets are title deeds for an urbanising world. A clay tablet dated about 600 BC has a world map with Babylon and the Euphrates near its centre. The Nazca lines in Peru in South America have also been variously associated with irrigation and celestial maps. By contrast, there are few maps from Ancient Egypt with those that are relating to the maintenance of the boundaries of properties after the annual Nile floods. However, the Turin papyrus map dating from about the 12th Century BC was used for those on quarrying expeditions and contains topographical features such as mountains, wells and road networks.

At a much later date, in The Middle Ages, remarkably accurate sea charts, called portolans, were used with the magnetic compass, which was not invented in Europe until the latter part of the12th century. These sea charts were all created in the same way from vellum from goats or sheep skin. Further, they were rectangular in shape with the neck skin of the animal still attached. They also all had line drawings in coloured ink. The charts basically consisted of a network of line drawings, with the cartographer drawing a hidden circle around a central point and then vertical and horizontal lines through the centre. A series of other circles were drawn with similar lines. Depending on the direction, these lines were then drawn in different colours. Another characteristic of the maps was the enlarged headlands because they were important for seafarers. Names going clockwise around the Mediterranean Sea were written perpendicular to the coastline to avoid obscuring the coastline.

With three-dimensional and digital maps, modern-day cartographers have very sophisticated digital tools at their disposal to make sense, shape and refine our place in the world and to guide us. As in the past, cartography as a science is still having a huge impact on human progress.