Stone Slab With The Earliest Map Of Europe Was Found In France

The region shown on the map most likely lies in western France near the River Odet.

The earliest known map in Europe may be a 4,000-year-old stone tablet that was initially uncovered over a century ago in France.

The Saint-Bélec Slab was found in an ancient burial place in Finistère, Brittany, in 1900 and belongs to the early Bronze Age (2150-1600 B.C.). It served as one of the cist's walls, a stone container used to store the remains of the deceased. According to a statement, the slab was probably created before it was used in the burial during the tail end of the early Bronze Age (1900–1640 B.C.).

The 12.7 foot (3.9 meter) long fractured slab was relocated to a private museum at the time of the discovery before being purchased by France's Museum of National Antiquities in 1924. After then, it was kept in a French chateau, where it collected dust until being rediscovered there in 2014. But the intriguing tale behind this ancient stone has only lately begun to be understood by academics.

2017 saw the beginning of the analysis of the engravings on the slab by a team of researchers in Europe utilizing high-resolution 3D surveys and photogrammetry, which is the act of evaluating an item via taking precise images. The marks on the slab, such as themes connected by lines, were everything they would have anticipated from a map, they found. They also discovered that the lines constituted a network of rivers, and that the creators of the image seemed to have purposefully reproduced a valley with a 3D shape.

The carvings on the slab were compared to other geographical features in France by the experts, who came to the conclusion that the slab depicted an area of 18.6 miles by 13 miles (30 kilometers by 21 kilometers) near the River Odet in western France.

According to research author Clément Nicolas of Bournemouth University, "This is perhaps the earliest map of a region that has been discovered" in Europe. This ancient European map demonstrates that we shouldn't undervalue the geographical skills of ancient cultures, according to Nicolas, since it was probably utilized by a Bronze Age prince or monarch to designate dominion over a certain region.

According to the statement, the region was probably possessed by a highly hierarchical governmental organization that firmly governed the region in the early Bronze Age.

The authors of the new research made this hypothesis: "The fact that it was afterwards buried may suggest that it was the end of their dominance or it may have been a rejection of the influence the elites had over society at the time."