Marine navigation is the art and science of steering a ship from a starting point (sailing) to a destination, efficiently and responsibly. It is an art because of the skill that the navigator must have to avoid the dangers of navigation, and it is a science because it is based on physical, mathematical, oceanographic, cartographic, astronomical, and other knowledge.

Marine navigation can be surface or submarine.

Navigation (from the Latin word navigatio) is the act of sailing or voyaging. Nautical (from Latin nautĭca, and this from Greek ναυτική [τέχνη] nautikḗ [téjne] "[art of] sailing" and from ναύτης nautes "sailor") is that pertaining to navigation and the science and art of sailing. Naval (from the Latin adjective navalis) is that relating to ships and navigation, or particularly to the navy.

In Ancient Rome, the navicularii conducted long-distance trade by sea.

Coastal navigation was practiced since the most ancient times. The biblical account of the great flood, where the Noah's Ark appears, is based both on myths and on the navigational practice of the Mesopotamian civilizations, who from the Sumerians onwards navigated their two rivers (Tigris and Euphrates) and the Persian Gulf. The ancient Egyptians did not limit themselves to inland navigation of the Nile either, and used the Mediterranean sea routes existing since the Neolithic — through which cultural phenomena such as megalithism or the metallurgy would have spread for millennia. The Cretans even established a true thalassocracy (government of the seas, attributed to King Minos) until the Mycenaean period (2nd millennium BC), when the events mythologized in the Homeric poems ought to be placed.

The Hittites, led by King Šuppiluliuma II faced the Cyprus in the first historically recorded naval battle (ca. 1210 BC); at the same time, all the civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean suffered from the incursions of the denominated "Sea Peoples".

The Phoenicians — whom the Greeks considered their masters in navigation and who are also cited in the Bible — would have been the first Mediterranean civilization to sail the high seas by sculling and sailing, guided by the sun during the day and by the North Star at night. It is recorded that, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar — the "Rock of Gibraltar", the so-called "Pillars of Hercules" in the Greek myths — they sailed across the Atlantic Ocean reaching the south to some point on the west coast of Africa and the north to the British Isles (or even beyond, to the place that the texts call Thule), but it is unclear if they circumnavigated Africa or crossed the Atlantic reaching America, something most likely achieved by the Norsemen in the 10th century.

In the Indian and Pacific oceans, the oceanic navigations made it possible to populate all the archipelagoes (Polynesian navigation). However, the possibility of reaching South America is still a matter of debate — the settlement of the Americas through the Bering Strait would not have required navigation, or in any case, coastal navigation would have sufficed — as well as other possible pre-Columbian transoceanic contacts. In the first quarter of the 15th century, the Chinese expeditions led by Zheng He reached the African coasts of the Indian Ocean. It has been proposed that they might have reached the South Atlantic and even America and Europe, but this proposal has not been accepted beyond mere speculation.