How was this map made?

[fabiopb]

Hi every one. I'm new to the forum, this is my 1st post.

Recently I came across this map hosted at wikipedia. It's a map of islamic cities in the 10th century:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...-Muqaddasi.jpg

I was wondering what software was used to render it. I found it very clear and detailed.

Thank you for the help.

[johnvanvliet]

if i had to guess " ArcGis " it is the gold standard of gis software tools

But " QGis" is doing a great job in the opensource area of Gis tools

[Azélor]

They probably used Natural earth as the base map.

[waldronate]

The bizarre hydrology suggests that someone took a height map and did some sort of flow-finding on it to get the rivers. The colors are derived directly from altitude. Both of these operations can be done using many common GID tools (of which ArcGIS and QGIS are examples). The labels are likely hand-placed, which can be done in many common image editing tools (of which GIMP, Photoshop, Inkscape, and Illustrator are examples); GIS tools can also do this kind of annotation. There is no way to say with certainty which tools were used to generate the map or which data sets were used to derive the images.

As Azelor suggests, a map based on a freely-available data set such as Natural Earth would give nicer results, but there were likely other constraints on the original author that prevented that sort of usage. You can ask Wikipedia user Ro4444 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ro4444 ) how the map was made for definitive information as they updated it in January of last year.