1513 Waldseemuller Map of Arabia

This is the Waldseemüller / Ringmann 1513 map of Arabia, considered one of the earliest acquirable maps of the Arabian Peninsula and essential to any serious Arabia collection. It was issued for Waldseemüller and Ringmann's 1513 Geographie Opus Novissima, then the most thoroughly edited and amended edition of Ptolemy. Moreover, this map was the most detailed map of the Arabian Peninsula to have been produced to date, illustrating and naming many of the islands of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and including comprehensive interior detail. Despite presenting ancient geography, the detail of Ptolemaic maps of the region had yet to be improved upon significantly, and so this map remained one of the most detailed maps of the Arabian Peninsula available, illustrating and naming many of the islands of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and including comprehensive interior detail.

The Scope of the Map

Coverage extends from the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa to Persia, fully embracing the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. Here, the outline of Arabia is recognizable, even if the surrounding islands are exaggerated. The toponymy reflects second-century Alexandrian scholarship: the explosion of Islam, and the concurrent importance of Mecca, Medina, and other places, occurred hundreds of years later. Nevertheless, Ptolemy's knowledge of Arabia was better than many other regions on the Roman periphery. Rome had engaged in efforts to dominate the peninsula in the first century CE, with the object of controlling the trade center in southern Arabia, a key link to India. Rome established bases around Arabia and made forays from the north, via the Hejaz, and via the Red Sea. These ventures reached as far as Najran and parts of Yemen. Between these reports and those dating to Alexander the Great, Ptolemy had a wealth of place names to catalog for this region. Tibbets theorized that much of Ptolemy's information also came from Arab tribesmen via the reports of Greek traders.

Their journeys from place to place, measured by camel marches, must have been the basis for his calculations of the positions of inland towns… The errors of such a method are very great, for a town is placed at an uncertain distance and in a vague direction. Nothing is known of the meanderings of the route, circumventions of mountains, sands, or lava tracts, whilst the physical capacities of camels are not taken into account.

Ptolemy's measurements of distance resulted in reasonable accuracy when contending with the Roman roads. However, his judgment of distances became less accurate further from the Mediterranean, so, unsurprisingly, the Arabian desert posed unique challenges. The toponymy reflects second-century Alexandrian scholarship: the explosion of Islam and the concurrent importance of Mecca, Medina, and other places occurred hundreds of years later, and thus, this is a pre-Islamic depiction of Arabia. Nevertheless, when Ptolemy's work began to appear in its fifteenth century and early sixteenth century printed editions, this map represented the foundation for the mapping the Arabian Peninsula. Printed maps exhibiting modern depictions of Arabia began to appear as early as 1513, but their detail would not rival the Ptolemaic maps until Gastaldi's 1548 map.

A New Ptolemy

This map appeared in the 1513 edition of Claudius Ptolemy's Geographia, whose translation and maps were the collaboration of Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, best known for their 1507 world map, Universalis Cosmographia. Starting with the maps printed in the 1482 Ulm Ptolemy, Waldseemüller and Ringmann consulted a variety of Greek and Latin sources in order to produce an authoritative, corrected edition of the classical proto-atlas. In addition to the twenty-seven maps based strictly on Ptolemy's data, it included twenty Tabulae Modernae. Among these maps are the first printed maps to focus on regions unknown to Ptolemy such as North America and southern Africa, but they also include maps of areas covered in Ptolemaic geography but with new topography and toponymy based on contemporaneous information, such as the maps of Lorraine and the upper Rhine (which Waldseemüller probably surveyed himself) and a map of Crete. Ironically, Waldseemüller's name did not appear in the published book, as he and Ringmann had had a falling out by 1513.

Publication History and Census

This map was drawn between 1507 and 1513 by Martin Waldseemüller at the Gymnasium Vosagense, an association of humanist scholars formed in Saint-Dié under the patronage of the Duke of Lorraine. The map was included in the Gymnasium's Geographie Opus Novissima Traductione e Graecorum Archetypis, printed in 1513 by Johannes Schott (Strasbourg). Schott published a single further edition of the book in 1520; there were no alterations to the maps, but patterns of wear and cracking to the block suggest a dating of 1520 for this example. We find two examples of this separate map listed in OCLC, one dated 1513 and one dated 1520, both in the Universitatsbibliothek Eichstatt. Rare to the private market.