The Babylonian Map of the World (or Imago Mundi) is a Babylonian clay tablet containing a labeled depiction of the known world, with a short and partially lost description, dated to roughly the 6th century BC (Neo-Babylonian or early Achaemenid period).
This cuneiform map of the Babylonian world is an archeological treasure on a par with the Rosetta Stone and the code of Hammurabi. It is the one of the oldest known world maps and certainly the most famous.
The tablet is oriented toward the northeast. It shows Babylon on the Euphrates, surrounded by a circular landmass with Assyria, Urartu (Armenia), Ocean and islands arranged around, forming a seven-pointed star.
Urartu is a geographical region commonly used as the exonym for the Iron Age kingdom also known by the modern rendition of its endonym, the Kingdom of Van, centered around Lake Van in the historic Armenian Highlands (present-day eastern Anatolia).
It is unknown what language was spoken by the peoples of Urartu at the time of the existence of the kingdom, but there is linguistic evidence of contact between the proto-Armenian language and the Urartian language at an early date.
The kingdom rose to power in the mid-9th century BC, but went into gradual decline and was eventually conquered by the Iranian Medes in the early 6th century BC. The geopolitical region would re-emerge as Armenia shortly after.
In the 6th century BC, with the emergence of Armenia in the region, the name of the region was simultaneously referred to as variations of Armenia and Urartu. Being heirs to the Urartian realm, the earliest identifiable ancestors of the Armenians are the peoples of Urartu.
In the trilingual Behistun Inscription, carved in 521 or 520 BC by the order of Darius I, the country referred to as Urartu in Akkadian is called Arminiya in Old Persian and Harminuia in the Elamite language.
The mentions of Urartu in the Books of Kings and Isaiah of the Bible were translated as “Armenia” in the Septuagint. Some English language translations, including the King James Version follow the Septuagint translation of Urartu as Armenia. The identification of the biblical “mountains of Ararat” with the Mt. Ararat (Turkish: Ağrı Dağı) is a modern identification based on postbiblical tradition.