Ancient Near East
As early as the time of the Ancient Near East, clay tablets were being produced with scaled, graphical representations of cities. Excavations of the Sumerian city of Nippur brought to light a fragment of an approximately 3,500-year-old city map, which is sometimes referred to as the oldest known city map. The clay tablet depicts the temple of Enlil, a city park, the city wall including its gates, along with a canal and the river Euphrates. The individual objects on this map were already labelled, in a Sumerian cuneiform.