To me cartography is the means by which we make sense of our worlds. Almost all of the earliest cartographic images are not simply way-finding maps, but contain messages of how human society is ordered and what the threats and opportunities to that society might be, as well as providing messages for how much better things could be. One the of the earliest maps of a city, Catalhoyuk, depicts houses built check by jowl, with no streets or even alleyways between them and with a threatening Volcano looming over this earliest of human concentrations (Figure 1). Recently, archaeologists have suggested that what we see today as a volcano may, in fact, have been a rather lurid leopard skin dress, drawn above the city for some other reason. We may never know if that dot-filled-form is dress or volcano, but we know that this map - revealed on a 9000-year-old plaster wall - served a purpose greater than simply being a remarkably accurate depiction of the buildings around it, for many thousands of years having been buried and ruined. The original image is augmented by two modern-day plans drawn directly below it. These show how the city without streets might have looked had anyone then been able to fly and how it was laid out in plan form. We presume that people got to their homes by walking over the roofs of others' property. Also almost certainly property will have had a different meaning then. There were no countries, as we know them now, and the idea of given generic names to masses of water, the entire lengths of river networks, and maybe of towns and cities will have all been inventions of thought that have come long since Catalhoyuk was first built, along with both the idea of streets and, in some cases, a very long time later: sewers. The modern-day map that privileges coastlines as being so important, which puts north uppermost and that leaves so much of its space blank, is useful for seeing how the bottleneck between three great continental land masses could have been the place where human innovation