Each of these maps did more than record a place. It moved a border, launched a science, fixed a name, or changed how people find their way. Half of them stretch the word map: charts of ocean swells, the night sky, the brain, the elements, a network, a genome. They run in date order, oldest first. The numbers are sequence, not rank.
Selection is a judgement call. The test was consequence: what happened because this map existed. Where historians dispute a date or an effect, the entry says so. Every entry links to a source.
Juan de la Cosa's chart of 1500 (the earliest surviving map to show the Americas), the Piri Reis map of 1513, the Madaba mosaic, Lewis and Clark's map of 1814, the Sanborn fire insurance atlases, the Gall-Peters projection row of 1973, and OpenStreetMap (2004) all have a claim. So does the Ordnance Survey's first sheet (1801). They lost out to entries that did the same job earlier or with wider effect.
Dates marked c. are approximate. For objects that survive only as later copies (Ptolemy, the Peutinger map, the Kangnido) the date is that of the original work. Dimensions and holdings come from the holding institution or the linked source. Thumbnails are public-domain or openly licensed images, credited in each entry; five maps still in copyright have none. Compiled November 2026.