City map

The graphic representation of objects on a city map is therefore usually greatly simplified, and reduced to generally understood symbology.

Densely settled downtown areas will sometimes be partly drawn in a larger scale, on a separate detail map.

As early as the time of the Ancient Near East, clay tablets were being produced with scaled, graphical representations of cities.

[3] In manuscripts and early printed books of the Late Middle Ages, cities are often shown in profile, or viewed from an elevated standpoint.

Nautical charts of that time sometimes depict partly stylized cityscapes drawn in pictogram form - for example in Cristoforo Buondelmonti's Liber insularum archipelagi (Book of Islands),[4] from the year 1422.

[6][7] An early example of a geometrically exact and highly detailed work of this kind is the city map of Venice created by Jacopo de' Barbari in around 1500.