Correction, first it was villages than they joined together, also they expanded their land a lot. villages, to towns, citys, city states, than empires
Google states, "A topographer is a specific type of cartographer. Topographers use contour lines to create 2-dimensional representations indicating the 3-dimensional aspects of portions of the earth's surface. Increasingly, these maps may be created digitally as well as on paper."
In simpler terms, a topographer surveys land and created representations of it.
