The cuneiform tablet from the 6th century BC shows an aerial view map of Mesopotamia — roughly modern-day Iraq — and what the Babylonians believed lay beyond the known world at the time.

Towering at a height of four metres, the Huang-Ming Yitong Da Tu, a magnificent old map of China, was hand-copied from an original produced by Japanese monks in Nagasaki in 1771. The map, whose ...