Five hundred years ago, a Bible accidentally printed with a backwards map of the Holy Land sparked a revolution in how people imagined geography, borders, and even nationhood. Despite the blunder, the ...

The idea of nations as neatly bordered spaces can be traced partly to medieval maps of biblical Israel. In A Nutshell ...

Coloring the world into tidy blocks with sharp edges feels natural today. Nations look solid on a classroom map. But that way ...

Lucas Cranach the Elder’s map was initially printed the wrong way round – showing the Mediterranean to the East – but its inclusion in a Bible set a precedent which continues to shap ...