Upside-Down World Map — South at the Top

HejMap · Surprising

Upside-Down World

Orientation South-up

There is no up in space

Why every map you have ever seen puts north at the top.

Nothing about the planet decides which way a map faces. Earth spins on an axis, but an axis has two ends and neither of them is above the other. North-up is a habit, and a fairly recent one.

How the habit formed

Ptolemy put north at the top of his maps in the second century, mostly because the places he knew best sat in the northern half of his known world and that put them in the comfortable upper-right of the page. When his Geography was rediscovered in Renaissance Europe, the convention came with it — and then the compass, the printing press and European sea power locked it in.

Before that, mapmakers pointed their maps almost everywhere. Medieval European mappae mundi put east at the top, toward the earthly paradise. That is where the word orientation comes from: the Latin oriens, the rising sun, the east. Meanwhile al-Idrisi's Tabula Rogeriana of 1154, the most accurate world map for the next three centuries, was drawn with south at the top, as many Islamic maps were.

The corrective map

In 1979 an Australian named Stuart McArthur published McArthur's Universal Corrective Map of the World, with south at the top and Australia near the centre. He had first drawn one at school at the age of twelve and been told to turn it the right way up.

Does it change anything?

Only in your head — which is the point. Researchers have repeatedly found a "north is up, up is good" bias: shown identical information, people tend to judge places toward the top of a map as wealthier, higher-status and further uphill. Turn the page over and the same continents feel unfamiliar, which is a useful reminder of how much a convention has been quietly doing.

2nd centuryPtolemy sets the north-up convention.
1154Al-Idrisi maps the world with south at the top.
Medieval EuropeEast at the top — the origin of "orientation".
1979McArthur's Universal Corrective Map is published.

Country outlines: Natural Earth (public domain). Historical detail from standard cartographic histories.