History of navigation

The history of navigation is the history of seamanship, the art of directing vessels upon the open sea through the establishment of its position and course by means of traditional practice, geometry, astronomy, or special instruments. A few people have excelled as seafarers, prominent among them the: Austronesians, their descendants the Malays, Micronesians, and Polynesians, the Harappans, the Phoenicians, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the ancient Tamils, the Norse, the ancient Bengalis, the Chinese, the Venetians, the Genoese, the Hanseatic Germans, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the English, the French, the Dutch and the Danes.

Sailors navigating in the Mediterranean made use of several techniques to determine their location, including staying in sight of land and understanding of the winds and their tendencies. Minoans of Crete are an example of an early Western civilization that used celestial navigation. Their palaces and mountaintop sanctuaries exhibit architectural features that align with the rising sun on the equinoxes, as well as the rising and setting of particular stars. The Minoans made sea voyages to the island of Thera and to Egypt. Both of these trips would have taken more than a day’s sail for the Minoans and would have left them traveling by night across open water. Here the sailors would use the locations of particular stars, especially those of the constellation Ursa Major, to orient the ship in the correct direction.

...
Wikipedia