1780 Schley Map of Canaan and its pre-Israelite Kingdoms

This rare 1780 map of Canaan presents the region of modern-day Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The map shows Canaan prior to the arrival of the Israelites. It shows the kingdoms of the Philistines, Canaanites, Amelekites, Ammonites, and the Kingdom of Bashan. The Jordan River, the sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are all shown. The doomed cities of Zeboim, Adama, Sodom and Gomorrah are all shown - unusually, for a holy land map of this period - on the shores of the Dead Sea, rather than in the middle of it. The map's topography i+K225:K22s based on contemporary cartographic data, but it was not intended to depict the 18th century Near East: rather, the place names are drawn from Biblical sources, reinforced with geographical data of ancient geographers.

Publication History and Census

This map was engraved by Jacob van der Schley for Martinus de Bruyn's Bybelsche huis en zak-Atlas, an atlas of fifteen maps intended to accompany Johan Jacob Schmidt's 1776 Bybelsche Geögraphicus . The atlas was not produced until 1780 and was relegated to a small, solitary edition. Consequently all of the maps of the atlas are rare. OCLC shows only nine examples of the zak-Atlas in institutional collections. One separate copy of this map is listed in OCLC, held by the National Library of Israel.