Compass rose

[1] Most mobile populations tend to adopt sunrise and sunset for East and West and the direction from where different winds blow to denote North and South.

The four Greek cardinal points (arctos, anatole, mesembria and dusis) were based on celestial bodies and used for orientation.

[citation needed] The Romans (e.g. Seneca, Pliny) adopted the Greek 12-wind system, and replaced its names with Latin equivalents, e.g. Septentrio, Subsolanus, Auster, Favonius, etc.

The other thirty points on the sidereal rose were determined by the rising and setting positions of fifteen bright stars.

[11] A similar sidereal compass was used by Polynesian and Micronesian navigators in the Pacific Ocean, although different stars were used in a number of cases, clustering around the east–west axis.

This suggests the mariner's rose was probably acquired by southern Italian seafarers; not from their classical Roman ancestors, but rather from Norman Sicily in the 11th to 12th centuries.

[14] The average portolan chart had sixteen such roses (or confluence of lines), spaced out equally around the circumference of a large implicit circle.

The cartographer Cresques Abraham of Majorca, in his Catalan Atlas of 1375, was the first to draw an ornate compass rose on a map.

[15] The points on a compass rose were frequently labeled by the initial letters of the mariner's principal winds (T, G, L, S, O, L, P, M).

[16] The use of the fleur-de-lis as north mark was introduced by Pedro Reinel, and quickly became customary in compass roses (and is still often used today).

Old compass roses also often used a Christian cross at Levante (E), indicating the direction of Jerusalem from the point of view of the Mediterranean sea.

[17] The twelve Classical winds (or a subset of them) were also sometimes depicted on portolan charts, albeit not on a compass rose, but rather separately on small disks or coins on the edges of the map.

), older compasses use the traditional Italianate wind names of Medieval origin (Tramontana, Greco, Levante, etc.).

Four-point compass roses use only the four "basic winds" or "cardinal directions" (North, East, South, West), with angles of difference at 90°.