Sixth Map of Asia (II)

Claudius Ptolemaeus (circa 100–circa 170), known as Ptolemy, was an astronomer, mathematician, and geographer of Greek descent who lived and worked in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.

In his Geography, Ptolemy gathered all the geographic knowledge possessed by the Greco-Roman world. He invented the geographic coordinate system and devised a method of using a grid or graticule made up of lines of latitude and longitude to plot the locations of some 8,000 places on the map that encompassed the known world at the height of the Roman Empire.

Ptolemy’s work was lost to Europe in the Middle Ages, but at the beginning of the 14th century Byzantine scholars began introducing versions of it into Italy. Johann Grüninger printed an edition of Ptolemy’s Geography in Strasbourg in 1522. He later reused the blocks for an enlarged edition that appeared in 1525.

Shown here is his April 1525 print of Ptolemy’s Tabula VI Asiae (Sixth map of Asia), published by Johann Koberger (circa 1454-1543) in Argentorati (i.e., Strasbourg). The text was translated into Latin by Willibald Pirckheimer (1470-1530), a scholar from Nuremberg. The map is dominated by the Arabian Peninsula.

The area shown stretches from part of Ethiopia in the southwest to the Indian Ocean in the southeast, and from the Arabian Desert in the northwest to Carmania (present-day Kerman Province, Iran) in the northeast. The shape of the Arabian Gulf is very loosely defined. The Tropic of Cancer is shown.

Names
Pirckheimer, Willibald, 1470-1530 Translator.
Ptolemy, 2nd century Cartographer.
Regiomontanus, Joannes, 1436-1476 Contributor.