Ptolemy, the master map maker was an Egyptian scientist, who had produced the maps of the ancient world. He drew Egypt in the centre of his map and to the north were the Mediterranean Basin and Greece.
Thus, Ptolemy marked the north at the top of his map. Since then, this practice has been followed. There is no scientific basis for this setting of maps. In the Middle Ages, maps were drawn with the east at the top and the north on the left.
For practical purpose, the cardinal points on a map should actually indicate the situations of the countries on a map, thus, serving the actual purpose of a map.
Below Map info from Wikipedia (Read More):-
Maps of the world or large areas are often either 'political' or 'physical'. The most important purpose of the political map is to show territorial borders; the purpose of the physical is to show features of geography such as mountains, soil type or land use. Geological maps show not only the physical surface, but characteristics of the underlying rock, fault lines, and subsurface structures.
Maps that depict the surface of the Earth also use a projection, a way of translating the three-dimensional real surface of the geoid to a two-dimensional picture. Perhaps the best-known world-map projection is the Mercator projection, originally designed as a form of nautical chart.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map
