Drawing on a set of case studies in the archives of early modern English travels to Muscovy, Persia and Central Asia, I define and theorize in this lecture what I call cartographic echoes. I address them both as the promise of a classical and humanist past reactivated within empire-thinking and empire-building projects, and as the vestige of an alternative past, non-Western and non-classical, complicating the travellers' and compilers' readings of history and the programme that history is supposed to set for the future.