Ever since ancient man decided that certain piece of land would participate in one tribe and another piece of land to another, there has been a dependence on land surveys. As the technology and means of mediation have definitely become more sophisticated through the years, the basic need to define our boundaries remains. Every major civilization in the annals of the world utilized land surveying, some with an increase of sophisticated and accurate results than others.
One of the first examples of surveying by mathematical means was by the Egyptians. THE FANTASTIC Pyramid at Giza, build around 2700 BC, demonstrates their prowess and understanding of surveying techniques. When the Nile overflowed its banks and flooded the plains, the ancient Egyptians redrew boundary lines by using basic geometry. Also, an Egyptian Land register existed as soon as 3000 BC. Though miles before other civilizations of their own time in regards to their surveying and irrigation techniques, nowadays we prefer a much more scientific approach to marking boundaries instead of declaring "I swear by the fantastic god that's in heaven that the proper boundary stone has been setup," when the boundary stones were replaced after the flooding waters of the Nile had receded.
Informative post upon the exemplory case of the Egyptians, the Romans went one step further and established Land Surveyor as an official position within the Roman Empire. They were called agrimensores, collectively referred to as Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum and they performed various tasks through the entire Empire. These were remarkably thorough and precise within their methodology; they would create straight lines and right angles using simple tools. After the lines were measured, they might create a furrow or perhaps a shallow ditch to represent the lines. Texts have already been found which date as far back as the initial century AD, plus some furrows created by them still exist today.
In England in 1086, William the Conqueror wrote the Domesday Book, which covered all of England and contained the names of the land owners, the volume of land they owned, the quality of said land, and specific information regarding each area's resources and peoples. As the breadth of information was impressive for the time, the technical surveying skills were lacking. The maps were not made to scale and didn't accurately show locations.
It should not surprise anyone to learn that Napoleon Bonaparte was thinking about proper surveying. If you are attempting to conquer the known world, it can help to have accurate maps. In 1908 he founded the cadastre, a thorough register of the house of a county, which included ownership details, location as precisely as possible, and as much information about the value and using the land. In addition, it included maps drawn to scale both at 1:2500 and 1:1250. Using the cadastre spread quickly, but ran into problems in the more sparsely populated and disputed areas, since it needed to be updated each and every time anything changed. Napoleon felt that the establishment of the cadastre would be his greatest accomplishment in civil law.
Land surveying has a lot more applications today than in those of our predecessors. As our means of recording and preserving our history becomes more sophisticated, so do the means by which we measure and record our boundaries and land.