The first attempts to depict the starry sky on a sphere date from the Chaldeans and the Egyptians. The Greeks apparently began to construct celestial globes with Eudoxus of Cnidus. After centuries of decline, globe-making revived toward the end of the first millennium in the Arab world, but did not spread from there to Europe until the fifteenth century. Globes were used as navigation aids and to show the positions and movements of the celestial bodies.

The notion of faithfully depicting the terraqueous globe on a sphere came later. Before then, planispheres and portolans were used. The Earth's spherical shape—already known to the Greeks—was definitively confirmed only after the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan sailed around the globe. The voyages of exploration fostered the renewal of cartography thanks to the geographic studies of Mercator, who devised innovative celestial and terrestrial globes.

In the mid-sixteenth century the first globes were made by pasting printed strips, or gores, onto a spherical shell. The oldest known European terrestrial globe is the one made by Martin Behaim of Nuremberg, in 1492, the very year in which Christopher Columbus discovered the American continent. A small globe by Martin Waldseemuller dating from 1509 was the first to show the name "America."