1486 Claudius Ptolemy / Nicolaus Germanus Map of Ancient Egypt

Extremely rare. This is a superb example, in rich original color, of one of the earliest printed maps of any part of Africa - this one focusing on the region of Libya and Egypt extending to the Red Sea, according to the second-century knowledge of Claudius Ptolemy. It appeared in the Ulm Ptolemy, the first such work printed north of the Alps, in 1482 and 1486. It presents the first mapping of the region by someone who lived there.

Ptolemy's Home Court

To Claudius Ptolemy, the source of this map, the subject matter was one he was intimately acquainted with: the Roman African provinces where he lived and worked between 100 and 170 CE. Politically Roman and culturally Greek, the scholar was native to Alexandria in Egypt. Consequently, none of the locations near the Mediterranean or along the lower Nile were strange to him. All these areas, accessible either by boat or Roman road, are well-detailed with place names. The map focuses particularly on the coastal provinces of Cyrenaica, Marmarica, and Aegyptus (Roman Egypt) but reaches southwards just beyond the tropic of Cancer.

On The Map

The north of the map is bounded by the Mediterranean Sea: here identified with local terms, the Egyptian Sea and the Sea of Libya, or the Punic Sea. The eastern limit of the map is the Red Sea, termed by Ptolemy the Arabian Gulf. Abutting the Arabian Gulf is Roman Egypt, which mainly comprises the Nile River Valley and the lands around the Nile River Delta. Its capital, Alexandria, is noted, and at the time, it was the Roman Empire's largest port and second-largest city. The province, embracing the Lower Nile, is the best-detailed province on the map. West of Egypt is Marmarica - now the Egyptian frontier with Libya. Among its noted locations is Antipyrgus, the ancient Tobruk. The city of Ammon, marked well inland, was situated in the Siwa Oasis and was so named as a sanctuary to the deity Amun.

The province Cyrenaica, which corresponds nowadays to the eastern half of Libya, occupies the map's western limit. The coastal region of Pentopolis (which was part of the same Roman province as Crete) is clearly noted.

The Harvesting Ground of the First Recorded Extinct Species

In the southern part of the province of Cyrenica beyond a mountain range is a forest region labeled 'Silfiofera Regio': this is the 'Silphium-producing land,' of great importance to classical antiquity. Silphium was a plant whose broad utility - seasoning, perfume, contraceptive, aphrodisiac - made it a vital cash crop worth its weight in silver. Such was its local importance that Cyrenian coins bore a picture of the plant. During the Roman administration of the province, Silphium went extinct - either due to Roman overharvesting of the valuable crop or by desertification in Cyrenaica. Whatever the cause, this was the first extinction of a plant or animal species in recorded history. (Legend has it that Emperor Nero devoured the last stalk, during the century prior to Ptolemy's work.) Despite the recent discovery of a plant in Turkey exhibiting many of the qualities of the ancient plant, no samples of the original Silphium survive, so it is impossible to conclusively identify modern Ferula Drudeana as the lost plant.

The First Woodcut Ptolemy

The Ulm Ptolemy was the first such work to be printed from woodblocks: the early Italian Ptolemies were printed from copperplates. The printer of the 1482 edition, Lienhart Holle, went into ruinous debt producing the book - not least due to this Ptolemy being the only one of the period to consistently receive hand coloring at the time of publication. The palette of this example is consistent with that which we have seen for examples of the 1486 edition of the work.

The Definitive 15th century Ptolemy

The source for the Ulm Ptolemy - and indeed, for all but one of the fifteenth-century printed Ptolemies - was Donnus Nicolaus Germanus (c. 1420 - c. 1490) whose manuscript translations were instrumental in spreading knowledge of it out of Italy: he represented the most influential disseminator of Ptolemy's work. Barring the 1482 Florence Ptolemy, all printed Geographia of the 15th century were copied from Nicolaus Germanus' manuscripts. The forest pictured around this map's Silfiofera Regio, for example, appeared in the Ptolemies sourced from Germanus' manuscripts but was not pictured in the 1482 Berlinghieri (which also chose a different spelling for the locale, 'Silphiophora Regio'.)

Publication History and Census

The woodcut for this map was made by the formschneider Johann Schnitzer de Armsheim for inclusion in the 1482 Holle edition of Ptolemy's Geography, titled by its translators at the time Cosmography. After Holle's patron, Justus de Albano, seized the blocks for nonpayment of the printer's debts, Albano commissioned a second edition of the work to be printed from the same blocks by the printer Johann Reger in 1486. There were no further editions using these blocks. While there is no distinction between the two states' printed images, the coloring used differs, mainly in Holle's profligate use of Lapiz Lazuli in coloring large bodies of water. Reger economized in the use of that deep (and prohibitively expensive) blue, restricting it to rivers and lakes, and the maps of the 1486 Reger edition characteristically have the seas and oceans filled with a tawny-brown color (which may once have been a brighter color.) We see 18 examples of the Holle Ptolemy in institutional collections and 10 of the Reger. No examples of the separate map are cataloged in OCLC. We see only two examples of this map that have reached the market in the past 40 years, of which this is one.