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There were several. Probably the two most important were the compass and the sextant.

Angle-measuring devices are named by the portion of a circle that they are. Early elevation measuring devices were primitive by comparison to modern ones, and w covered one quarter of a circle, and so they were called a "QUADRANT". Smaller ones used a mirror arrangement; they could be half the size without losing accuracy. These covered an eighth of a circle, and were called "OCTANTS", from the Latin "octo-" for "eighth". But these weren't big enough to measure high elevations, so they increased in size to cover a sixth of a circle (with the same mirror arrangement to double the angle) and were named for the Latin word for six, or "sextus"; this is the modern SEXTANT.

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