We humans are lost without directions. The four cardinal points – north, south, east and west – seem part of our in-built route-finding toolkit. Jerry Brotton’s Four Points of the Compass takes this assumption, turns it on its head and shows readers how these innocent-­sounding directions have been variously deities, literary devices and ideological tools.

The four points of the compass are not an inevitable feature of human societies. To the astronaut who took a picture of Earth from space in 1972, it wasn’t clear which way was north (or ‘up’) and which south (or ‘down’). When NASA first developed the photograph, it showed the North Pole at the bottom. Back on Earth, some societies dispense with the cardinal points altogether: the Yurok people of California have no words for any of the four directions, while the Manus islanders of Papua New Guinea prefer to think in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’.

Nonetheless, the four directions are undeniably ancient. They were first men­tioned, Brotton tells us, in Mesopotamia in the 23rd century BC during the reign of Naram-Sin of Akkad, a potentate who modestly referred to himself as ‘King of the Four Corners of the World’. The Gasur Map, inscribed on a