Is an kind of "sideways" world map a good idea?

I plan to base the fantasy world-map in my story on the medieval O & T map. (A circular world surrounded by the ocean, divided with the Don & Nile rivers and the Mediterranian. It also often places East, the direction of sunrise & paradise in the north.) Turn a map 90 degrees so the east-pole is in the north... Should I also change the names of the directions, so the sun rises in the north, sets in the south, it is cold in the extrme east and west and the warm equator lies in between? Or what should I do? It would be a bit confusing to turn the map and keep the real directions...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map

I would point out that the old maps weren't changing the directions, they didn't think the sun rose in the North, it was just the convention to have the eastern edge of your map as the top edge (as far as writing and things like that go). I don't know when the convention changed to have north facing up.

If you're going to rotate your map from the conventional layout, you'll want to make sure readers know this. Otherwise, I don't see the issue.

A little research revealed that there is little agreement over when and why modern maps began to show North as at the top of the map. My own impression is that as Europeans became aware of the size of the globe, and the fact that the longest range travel and exploration was oriented East to West, it was convenient to put North at the top of world maps, but that's just speculation on my part. If you are inventing a new world for your stories, you can orient the continents any way you like.

As to what you call them, the term "East" and "West" derive from ancient words that denote the direction of sunrise and sunset. So it makes little sense to propose that the sun rises in the "north", which means "left of where the sun rises".

Edited by DeMarquis on Oct 23rd 2018 at 4:54:28 AM