Overview

Where am I? Sound familiar? We travel to some destination then we realize we lost our way. We agonize upon it when we overshoot or undershoot our destination. Or when we take the wrong route or the wrong freeway exit and find ourselves in a foreign territory. Quite often these incidents end up without incident, but in few occurrences they could result in unhappy endings. This is not a modern day problem but is something that man has lived with since the beginning of time. People needed to migrate to different lands in search of food and water. They needed to travel to trade with other people living in different areas. In so doing they did not migrate or travel en masse; they probably sent scouts to explore the unknown territories who had to return to inform their tribes with their findings. The scouts must have used some landmarks or followed some terrains so they could return safely. But what would they have done when the land they traveled over had no distinguishing features. They must have established some sort of bearing that could guide them in their back and forth trips. Similar measures must have been used when sailing the open seas; a ship with an unknown bearing was a vessel of the doomed.

The priority of navigation with the ancients has not changed over several millenniums and is just as relevant as it is with today's field of modern navigation. It is centered upon one core,...