How the compass became a political weapon

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Why did early Islamic cartographers place South at the top of their maps? Who invented the magnetic compass? And why has the West become an intensely political term as well as a geographical one? Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizen, Jerry Brought answers the most intriguing questions on the history of the four cardinal points North, East, South, and West.

So Jerry, thank you very much for joining us today. Your new book explores the history of the four points of the compass. When does this story start? It's a good question because the more I did the research on it, the further back you go. And you could almost say that it starts when you first have an understanding, when humanity first sees the sunrise and the sunset.

So the sun sets, of course, we think about it setting in the west and it rises in the east. Subsequent to that, you work out that at midday the sun is due north on a north-south axis. So quite early on, and we don't really obviously have recorded history of this, you start to get those basic four directional points. I'd sort of date the the way in which we think about these four points. We we'd say of the compass.

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