EUROPAE I. TAB.

Mercator’s map of Great Britain, based on Ptolemy’s Geographia. This map, with its unaltered strapwork cartouche, is from an earlier edition of the atlas. The Ptolemaic maps were based in the work of Claude Ptolemy (AD 87 - 150) a Greek mathematician, astronomer and geographer, living in Alexandria, who published his 8 volume Geographia in AD 150. The atlas was supposedly illustrated with a world map, 26 regional maps and a profusion of smaller maps. Although the text of the Geographia survived, no pre-twelfth century maps have survived and we have no means of knowing whether the 'Ptolemy' maps were drawn by him or were the interpretations of later map makers using his text as a basis. The first edition of Ptolemy’s atlas produced in the west, in 1482 in Ulm, was by by Dominus Nicolaus Germanus, a Benedictine monk. Mercator followed in the footsteps of other cartographers - Berlinghieri, Munster, Gastaldi to name but three -who published their own versions of Ptolemy.

Fine condition.