Simon Garfield starts his journey through the story of maps in the Great Library of Alexandria where, for the first time, scholars began to plot the wider world.

Ptolemy's atlas of AD 150 was to provide a template of the world for more than a thousand years and it was a version of this that Columbus took with him when he set sail for Japan in 1492.

Producer: Clive Brill
A Pacificus production for BBC Radio 4. Show less