I
WORLD MAP
By Claudius Ptolemy. Alexandria, Second Century, A.D.
(In Nicolo Todescho, “Geographia.” Firenze, 1478 [? ].)
(Library of Congress.)
Claudius Ptolemy was a Greek astronomer, mathematician, and geographer. Little is known of him personally, aside from the fact that he lived in the second century, during the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus, in, or near, Alexandria, Egypt. He himself states that he “made his observations in the parallel of Alexandria.” His earliest recorded observation was made in 127 A.D. and his last in 151 A.D. There is no evidence that he belonged to the royal family of Egypt.
Ptolemy is the author of two celebrate treatises which profoundly affected mediæval thought. In his Magale Syntaxis, more commonly known by its Arab title Almagest, he laid the foundation of trigonometry and set forth his system of the universe, which largely determined the opinions of the learned world for fourteen hundred years. He conceived of the earth as a stationary sphere, at the center of the heavens, which revolved daily about it. His proofs of the sphericity of the earth are still accepted as valid. The theory of the rotation of the earth about its axis was rejected by him as ridiculous. Columbus and his contemporaries based their theories concerning the shape of the earth and its position in the universe on the system of Ptolemy.
Ptolemy's second treatise, Geographikè Syntaxis, containing twenty-seven maps, was the standard work on geography throughout the Middle Ages and was not superseded until the sixteenth century. While no original manuscript of Ptolemy's work has survived, several manuscript copies still exist and one of them, dating from the thirteenth century, in the monastery of Vatopédi on Mount Athos,[1] has been reproduced. The most valuable manuscript is in the Vatican Library.
Ptolemy states in his preface that his geography and maps were based directly on a work by an older contemporary of his, Marinus of Tyre, whose maps are only known through those of Ptolemy.[2]
While there is no doubt that Ptolemy's text was from the first illustrated by maps, it is not altogether certain that the maps published with the text are copies of the maps published with the text are copies of the original series. It is stated in two of the manuscripts that the maps were made by Agathodæmon of Alexandria, “who drew them according to the eight books of Claudius Ptolemy,” but there is nothing else known about Agathodæmon. The latest opinion is that “Agathodæmon can only be regarded as author of the maps of the world…; the twenty-six regional maps represent the Ptolemaic edition of the maps designed by Marinus.”[3] As the map corresponds closely to the text in the Geographikè, it may safely be said to represent the ages and ideas of Ptolemy. It is noteworthy that in its reproductions the map escaped the pictorial fancies characteristic of mediæval maps.
As the Greek language was little known in Western Europe in the fifteenth century, the translation was begun by Emmanuel Chrysoloras and completed by his pupil Jacobus Angelus, who dedicated it to Pope Alexander V. A manuscript copy of this translation containing twenty-seven Latin maps and bearing the title Cosmographia is in the town library at Nancy, France.
The first printed edition is believed to be that of 1475 a copy of which is in the John Carter Brown Library in Providence. The date 1462 on another edition is thought to be an error. Within the next century over fifty editions were published, of copies of forty-one. The reproduction here given is of the map of the world in a copy of the Florence edition of 1478 in the Library of Congress. The maps in this edition are said by Nordenskiöld to be “the only copies of Ptolemy's maps printed on their original projection with equidistant parallels and meridians.” In addition to the twenty-seven maps, one of the world, here reproduced, and twenty-six of special regions, which are the same in all complete manuscripts of the Geographikè, this edition contains four contemporary maps of Italy, Spain, France and Palestine, which are the foundation of modern cartography. The maps in this Florence edition, probably the first printed on copper, are decidedly inferior in execution to those in the edition published at Rome in the same year, a copy of which may be seen in the New York Public Library. The text of the Florence edition is a metrical translation into Italian made by Francisco Berlinghieri.
The most famous later editions are those of Donnus Nickolaus Germanus in 1482 and 1486, which added knowledge of the British Islands, Scandinavia, and Greenland; John Ruysch;[4] Martin Waldseemüller;[5] Michael Servetus, whose
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