Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 1525 map is the first ever printed in a bible, but there’s just one problem: it was printed backwards.
• The document nonetheless stands as a transition point between the spiritual boundaries of the twelve tribes of Israel and the political realities that extend beyond the region.
• A new study argues that this often-overlooked map had a profound impact on how we first began thinking about the borders of nation-states.

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One of civilization’s greatest tools, maps have defined human progress since the beginning of recorded history. From the Babylonian Map of the World—the oldest-surviving attempt by humans to depict the world on a 2D surface—to the satellite images that meticulously detail every feature of the planet today, maps have had an undeniable impact on history and how humans place themselves in that grand story.

But what happens when you combine one of humanity’s greatest tools with what is arguably its most influential book? Well, you get Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 1525 map—the very first map to ever be published in the Bible. In a new study published in The Journal of Theological Studies, Nathan MacDonald from Oxford University argues that this map shaped our understanding of state borders today. Unfortunately, there’s just one big problem with the document: It was printed backwards.

“This is simultaneously one of publishing’s greatest failures and triumphs,” MacDonald said in a press statement. “They printed the map backwards so the Mediterranean appears to the east of Palestine. People in Europe knew so little about this part of the world that no one in the workshop seems to have realized. But this map transformed the Bible forever and today most Bibles contain maps.”

The map, created by German Renaissance printer and paintmaker Lucas Cranach the Elder, appeared in Christopher Froschauer’s 1525 Old Testament Bible and was originally printed in Zürich during the early years of the Swiss Reformation. This was during a time when the traditional iconography of the Catholic Church was banned, but those restrictions didn’t extend to maps, which only aided the growing emphasis on a literal interpretation of the Bible. Relying on previous maps that divided Israel into twelve tribes, Cranach’s map extended that idea beyond the borders of the Holy Land, beginning the inkling representations of national borders.

“Early modern notions of the nation were influenced by the Bible, but the interpretation of the sacred text was itself shaped by new political theories that emerged in the early modern period,” MacDonald said in a press statement. “The Bible was both the agent of change, and its object.”

In the context of the Bible, the lines of the maps depicted spiritual realities, but when Lucas Cranach the Elder’s map expanded out into the wider world, they began shaping political realities as well. This conflation of the religious and the political is still one humans heavily debate more than five centuries later.

“We should be concerned when any group claims that their way of organizing society has a divine or religious underpinning,” MacDonald said in a press statement, “because these often simplify and misrepresent ancient texts that are making different kinds of ideological claims in very different political contexts.”

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.