As The UN Adopts An Equal World Map, Meet The Three Geographers Who Disputed How The Earth Was Charted 2000 Years Ago

(MENAFN- The Conversation) For more than 200 years, the standard map of the world has been based on a 1569 chart of the globe pioneered by Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594).

But in spite of its historic popularity, the Mercator Projection the has long been recognised as problematic. The main issue is that, for navigational reasons, it artificially enlarges the regions nearest to the poles, making Africa – which straddles the equator – appear roughly the same size as Greenland, despite being about 14 times larger.

On 4 September 2026, the UN passed a motion tabled by representatives from Togo and backed by a number of African nations, to endorse and adopt a new world map. The map in question is the Equal Earth Projection, developed in 2018 by prominent cartographers Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny.

It will, in theory, replace the Mercator Projection, which the Togo campaigners say risks insinuating that Africa and its peoples are politically and culturally peripheral. The Equal Earth Projection corrects this distortion by accurately depicting the relative areas of the continents.

This critique of Mercator is timely and important, and it also taps into a long history of disputes about how the continents should appear on the map.

Their sizes, and the politics of their representation, were already major points of contention for the ancient geographers of Greece and Rome, including Herodotus, Strabo and Pliny (the Elder), and each approached the depiction of the planet from a different perspective.

1. Herodotus on the symmetrical Earth

One of the earliest recorded attempts to correct the map comes from the fourth book of Herodotus' Histories (5th century BCE). In it, the Greek geographer and historian mocks the work of earlier cartographers and accuses them of making their maps artificially symmetrical:

Herodotus replaces this world picture with a strikingly different vision of the Earth in which Europe dwarfs both Asia and Libya (the name he uses to refer to Africa):

2. Strabo on scale and power

Herodotus gives no overall measurements of Libya (Africa). He describes it as very broad, connected to Asia, and smaller than Europe. The Greek geographer Strabo, writing under Roman rule (1st century BC), offers a different assessment. In the 17th book of his Geography, he challenges the conventional threefold continental division on the grounds that Libya falls far short of a third of the inhabited world and may in fact be smaller than Europe:

The vision of the Earth supplied by Strabo is a striking departure from Herodotus, with Asia occupying more of the inhabited world than Europe and Libya combined. But most consequential is his claim about what such differences in size represent.

By connecting the small scale of Libya to its allegedly inferior power and drawing attention to its deserts and scattered settlements, he invites his readers to imagine that the size and character of a territory determine its political power.

3. Pliny on geography and empire

The connection between size and power is made even more explicit by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (1st century BC). He offers a vision of the world reminiscent of Herodotus in which Europe is by far the largest of the continents:

Later, he gives a more detailed account of these divisions, based on some confusing measurements drawn from several, sometimes conflicting, sources:

Pliny effectively inverts the point made by Strabo about the relationship between the small size of Libya and its lacklustre profile on the world stage and applies it to Europe. He situates his claim about the size of Europe right next to his celebration of it as the homeland of the Romans, who have become conquerors of the entire world. The juxtaposition suggests that the masters of the Earth fittingly occupy its greatest and most beautiful portion.

These episodes show us that, long before the debate over Mercator, the representation of the sizes of the continents was already entangled with questions about power and prestige.

The campaign for the Equal Earth Projection, and the proper recognition of the scale of Africa, proceeds from this same, ancient assumption: that the way a continent appears on the map can shape perceptions of its place in the world.

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