Excavated relics suggest that the Egyptians were using basic tools at this time to identify boundaries and mark distances. It is placed in a north-south orientation and its angles are perfectly square, characteristics which alone suggest some analysis of the site was done before construction took place. Built around 2700 B.C., the building’s dimensions are exactly 755 feet long and 480 feet in height. One of the first examples of a building that was clearly built with some mathematical precision was the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Giza, Egypt. Scientists consider the ancient Egyptians to be the first people to have engaged in something resembling modern surveying. With time, interest developed in setting boundaries, identifying private land and constructing buildings and community centers with some degree of precision and accuracy. How did it all start? Thousands of years ago, human beings created settlements after years of nomadic life. Now we know that the best maps are created from first-hand information gathered from work on the ground. The first maps were pieced together in a haphazard manner and relied on second-hand information gleaned from travel narratives and other untested sources. As this historic blog series has shown, maps as we know them now and details about our physical space were limited or non-existent for thousands of years. But, this huge variety of data has not always been available. Centuries of discovery, research, and human ingenuity have produced data in the form of LIDAR, satellite imagery, digital elevation terrain data, GIS and more. An engineer’s ability to tackle a complex modeling project requires accurate and reliable baseline data.
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