La Seconde Table Generale Selon Ptol.

1540 / 1568 Münster Map of the World According to Ptolemy

Date d'édition : 1540

A propos de cet article

Very good. Light marginal soiling and some scuffing to centerfold. Size 10.25 x 13.25 Inches. An attractive example of Sebastian Münster's 1540 map of the world, according to Claudius Ptolemy, in a 1568 French text edition. The map details the Oikumene , the inhabited world as it was known to the Roman Empire of the second century, well before the Age of Discovery. It covers only the 'Old World' from the Atlantic (Pillars of Hercules) to Indochina, and from the Arctic to the Tropic of Capricorn. The map is surrounded by aeoli and clouds. On the Map The map shows a roughly conic projection of part of the globe reaching as far south as the Tropic of Capricorn. (Ptolemy knew the world was round, as did virtually every geographer and astronomer of the classical era.) Europe can be seen in the upper left. Below it, a familiar North Africa continues into a massive continent, expanding to fill the lower part of the map. The African interior is dominated by two great river systems, the Niger, extending from the Atlantic, and the Nile. The southern extreme of Africa continues into a massive landform surrounding the Indian Ocean and ultimately connecting with Asia beyond the Malay Peninsula (a territory called India Extra Gangem (India beyond the Ganges). Within the enclosed Indian Ocean, Arabia and the Persian Gulf are clearly recognizable. Taprobana, in the midst of this great sea, is mostly probably the island of Ceylon or modern-day Sri Lanka. It appeared on Ptolemaic maps greatly exaggerated in size due to its significance to the classical spice trade. Scholars of Münster's day, however, were beginning to suspect that the great insular trade center described in Ptolemy's work was actually Sumatra. India, appearing amorphously just to the north, is undersized by comparison. Beyond Ptolemy The depiction on this map of Scandinavia - Sept?trional Regiones - does not originate with Ptolemy. The northern limits of the Ptolemaic world map end at about 63 degrees north, and there are no Ptolemaic maps specifically of Scandinavia: for the 2nd century Alexandrian Roman, those areas were utterly unknown, beyond the remotest hinterlands of the north. Some fifteenth century manuscript editions of Ptolemy began to include a new mapping of the northern regions, and this part of the world began to be appended to the Ptolemaic world map, as Münster has done here: the Ptolemaic maps he would have had access to during his student years in Germany would have included this element. The Classical Foundations of Modern Geography Münster's Cosmographia contained a complement of between fourteen and twenty-eight maps, depending on the edition. Virtually all of these were notable for being among the first printed maps of the areas they depicted. They included maps of the whole continents of America, Asia and Africa, as well as a more modern map of the world than this one. Why, then, did Cosmographia include this element of ancient geography? The maps appearing in Münster's Cosmographia had an earlier outing in his authoritative, expanded version of Ptolemy's Geographia. This work presented Ptolemy's exhaustive tables plotting the coordinates of the cities, mountains, rivers, and seas of the known inhabited world - the Oikumene . To these classical maps, Münster added maps showing both the new discoveries made since Ptolemy, and also the changes to place names that had occurred in the intervening period. But while Münster corrected Ptolemy's antiquated data, he retained the ancient scholar's methodology - laying out a grid on a projection, assigning coordinates to real world locations, and then plotting those locations out on the projection to produce a mathematical map. Ptolemy's Geographia would remain an essential, foundational work studied by geographers up into the eighteenth century, so updated and improved editions of the work (such as Münster's) would continue to be published. Münster's inclusion of Ptolemy's Oikumene in his otherwise explic.

N° de réf. du vendeur WorldPtolemy-munster-1540-3

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: La Seconde Table Generale Selon Ptol.
• Date de parution: 1540
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • WORLD-MAPS