You're just throne this out there, aren't you? 😉

That would be an option, although the ones that have survived best have commonly been accidentally baked when the buildings they were in caught fire! That would certainly get rid of most paper and electronic materials as well, of course - so maybe the ancient Sumerians really had electronic computers we don't know about too 😉!

Carved on stone might work as well.

Keep taking the tablets...

Thanks very much Remy. And apologies for sending yet another batch of new maps to you for the Atlas yesterday... Still, this way we get to watch the Atlas grow and grow!

That's a shame; I kinda want a complete style with this look now 😉😁! Could be a lot of new Annual issues in it, Sue 😎!

Too late to be of much use now, I realise. However, dashed lines, even when you've adjusted the settings to give suitable lines and spaces, often need minor tweaks after drawing them, as has been mentioned already. As Sue said, simply adjusting one node on the line by a few pixels is often enough to stop the unwanted "looong" line segment, or occasionally removing one node, although I find the line adjustment method is more reliable, and easier to correct. Of course, you have to check the whole line, because correcting one spot may create problems elsewhere. So again, I often draw any lines like this in shorter stretches, to keep such difficulties within manageable limits.

The problem seems to be commoner when you have a couple of nodes quite close together in one part of the line, so again as Sue suggested, keeping the number of nodes overall as low as practical, will likely help. (Except when it doesn't, of course 😉!)