The principles of land surveying date back almost as far as the idea of land ownership. Since ancient man determined that certain piece of land would belong to one group, and another piece to another group, there was a have to mediate between land disputes. That's where land surveying came in, although today surveys are also used for many other purposes.
Since then,
Article source in the history of the planet has used some form of land surveying, although they will have certainly are more sophisticated over time both with changing laws and improved technologies. Today, GPS along with other technologies allow for a much more exact survey than was possible just a couple of short decades ago. As you can imagine, ancient maps and land surveys were even less accurate.
Among the first types of a land survey using mathematical means was in ancient Egypt. The Great Pyramid, built around 2700 BC at Giza, demonstrates Egyptians' knowledge of surveying techniques. Ancient Egyptians also redrew boundary lines using basic geometry after the Nile River flooded the plains. An Egyptian land register existed as soon as 3000 BC, or five thousand years back, to record the owners of various bits of land and their locations. These early surveying efforts by the Egyptians were years ahead of other civilizations, as was true in lots of the areas of Egyptian technology as well. These surveys were predicated on geometry as well as simple declarations that they believed these boundaries to be correct.
In the Roman Empire., the Romans actually established 'land surveyor' as an official position. They were called agrimensores. Texts describing their actions date back to the first century AD. Thorough and precise, these were known for creating impeccably straight lines and right angles using simple tools. After measuring these lines, they would dig a shallow ditch to represent the lines. Amazingly, a few of these ditches still exist to the present day.
In eleventh century England, William the Conqueror wrote his now-famous Domesday Book. This book, covering all of England, meticulously covered the names of most land owners, the quality and level of this land, and info on individuals and resources in each area. Although the amount of information contained in this book was quite impressive, this is not just a technical survey, and the maps weren't drawn to scale and weren't very accurate.
Napoleon Bonaparte was the first to mandate a cadastre, in 1808. At times, Napoleon even thought that the cadastre would be his greatest contribution to civil law. The cadastre is really a thorough register of the property in a given county. The information it includes includes ownership details, location (as precisely measured as possible given then-current technology), and as much information about the worthiness and usage of the land as was available. This cadastre included scale maps at both 1:2500 and 1:1250. Cadastre use spread quickly, and indeed it was the origin of today's cadastral surveys. However, it had been difficult to make a cadastre in rural areas or those where land was in dispute.

Today's surveys are a lot more accurate than those done in decades or centuries past because of sophisticated opportinity for measuring and recording boundaries and land features. There are plenty of more applications of land surveys than recording land ownership