Celestial maps are older than human civilisation itself.

The Lascaux Cave Paintings in France, from 15,000 B.C., might be the oldest we have found.

Then there's the Nebra Sky Disc, discovered in Germany and dated to around 1600 B.C., the oldest definitive physical star map in history.

A rudimentary but beautiful artefact.

The Ancient Babylonians, humanity's first true astronomers, compiled highly detailed star catalogues.

They list constellations, individual stars, planets, and more, even omens!

This is from about 700 B.C., though based on much older work.

The Romans made a copy of an older Greek sculpture depicting Atlas bearing the weight of a celestial sphere.

This version, known as the Farnese Atlas, dates from 150 AD. But the original was from around 150 BC, based on the astrological work of Hipparchus of Nicaea.

The Dendera Zodiac, created in 50 BC in Egypt, is regarded as the most complete ancient map of the night sky.

The right hand image clarifies which constellations are depicted.

Ptolemy (100-170 AD) was an ancient polymath whose Almagest is one of the most influential scientific works of all time, and was the definitive work of astronomy for a thousand years or more.

Ptolemy's catalogue of 48 constellations is the predecessor of the modern system.

The oldest surviving star map in manuscript form is from Tang Dynasty China.

This is the Dunhuang Star Atlas, written down in around 700 A.D., and based on even older Chinese astronomy.

Later came Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi's 10th century Book of Fixed Stars, a fusion between Ptolemy's classical Almagest and traditional Bedouin astronomy.

And Medieval Islamic scholars further developed an important ancient invention: the astrolabe.

This was, in its essence, a miniature model of the cosmos.

But it was also a tool used for navigation, among other things.

Meanwhile this is an early 10th century "planisphere" - a simple device in which rotating discs are used to display the stars which will be visible at any given time or date.

Here is a handheld version of the astrolabe. This one dates from around 1400 and was made by a Parisian called Jean Fusoris.

The great Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) engraved his own celestial maps, based on the works of some of the aforementioned astronomers.

This is a rather extravagant celestial globe created by a Swiss clockmaker called Jost Bürgi in 1595.

While here is a highly detailed map of the entire celestial sphere (both hemispheres included) from a 1603 star atlas called Uranometria by Johann Bayer.

And here is a 1690 depiction of the Andromeda constellation by Johannes Hevelius.

This one was created by Alexander Jamieson in the early 19th century.

In 1824 a set of star chart cards called Urania's Mirror was released, with illustrations based on those by Jamieson.

They were punched with small holes which could be held up to candlelight to allow light to shine through, creating the impression of a handheld constellation.

Here's the first ever photograph of the Orion Nebula, from 1880, compared to a more recent attempt...