The World’s Oldest Map Reveals Lands Beyond the Ocean — and What Lives There

In the British Museum sits a small clay tablet, barely the size of your hand — the oldest map of the world ever found, carved in Babylon over 2,600 years ago.
It shows the known world as a disc, ringed by a vast ocean the Babylonians called the Bitter River — the edge of everything.
But here’s what makes it extraordinary: the map doesn’t stop at the ocean. Beyond the water, it marks mysterious outer regions — and the text on the back describes what lives there.