Why do world maps always show the Americas on the west and Asia on the east?

Question

If the world is round can we make any point of the world the center in maps? Or is there a specific reason all the world maps show the continents in the same orientation?

In: 6

Answer 1

In principle, sure, we could do that. But cutting along the date line is intuitive. It’d seem a bit weird if you were looking at a map and somewhere near the middle the time zones jumped from -11 to +12, whereas when you cut on the date line one side of the map has -11, then -10… 0 nearish the middle, and then counting up towards +12 in the east.