Probably more than any other physical phenomenon, cities are a reflection of the incredible complexity of the modern world. And in the mid-1500s, as modern cities began to burgeon throughout Europe, cartographers and artists scrambled to depict their new shapes and sizes. In some cases, these cityscapes were considered entertainment—the first atlas of cityscapes ever published, 1572’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum or Cities of the World, was wildly popular throughout Europe for decades.

These weren’t just maps, they were advertisements.

Thanks to its global trade empire, its academic centers, and its reputation for navigation on the high seas, the Netherlands was at the center of the mapping revolution in the 16th century. And Civitates was kind of like its Planet Earth: a beautiful, exotic glimpse into 450 different cities all over the world, drawn by dozens of different artists who wove together different styles of painting and cartography into images that told vivid stories about the places they depicted, and even functioned as advertising for them.

Reissued by Taschen with a foreword by Rem Koolhaas a few years ago and recently reviewed by Hyperallergic, it’s widely considered the grandaddy of urban mapping projects, a reflection of the fascination people of the 16th century felt about their rapidly evolving world.

Even though many artists contributed to the atlas, most of them came from the famous Frans Hogenberg, a Dutch engraver whose style combined realistic perspectives of cities with raucous colors and symbolic flourishes. Some mixed first-person perspectives with aerial views—at that point, bird’s-eye view was radical, and limited to the imagination of the artist. “It is impossible to read and look at this book without feeling profound awe and intense envy,” Koolhaas writes in his foreword.

They were beautiful, for sure, but the real point of the maps was to communicate a town’s prospects, as the editor of Taschen’s reprint, Stephan Füssel, writes. Harbors and rivers indicated a city was—or could be—a center for trade. A city wall or castle would “symbolize peace and order,” while natural features nodded to a “healthy landscape,” Füssel explains. Gallows could indicate civil order, while mills might hint at burgeoning industry. The harborside maps are by far the most elaborate and detailed, and Koolhaas points to the “liquidity” of those coastal cities, “an ominous foreboding of the future chaos the centrifuged forces of globalization will unleash.”

Each drawing was an early form of visual identity.

Each drawing was a unit of semiotic meaning that could tell you about a city’s history or its business; in a way, they were an early form of visual identity.

And in at least one case, a city from the atlas was outraged over its depiction. Füssel writes about the German town of Wismar, on the northern coast, which wasn’t just mislabeled as the wrong city—its description was devoted to an account of a horrifying murder that took place in the city in which a carpenter murdered his wife and child. “Dear God, is it possible to imagine anything more dreadful than this murder?” wrote the tome’s editor, Georg Braun. He made it up to Wismar in the next edition, which “praises the city and its harbor in ringing tones.”