See my piece in Nautilus on how the first map of the world ever constructed tells us about how our brain organizes our experience of the world around us.
"In the first half of the sixth century B.C., a Greek man named Anaximander, born in Turkey, sketched the world in a way no one had previously thought to do. It featured a circle, divided into three equal parts. He labeled those parts Europe, Asia, and Libya, and separated them by the great waterways of the Nile, the Phasis river, and the Mediterranean. To call it a map would perhaps be a bit overgenerous. It was really more of a schematic. But it nonetheless represented a crucial innovation. Anaximander had rendered the world in a way that no person had ever seen it before: from above."