The second printed map of Persia.
Claudius Ptolemy, often considered the “Father of Geography” was a Greco-Egyptian scholar working in Alexandria, Egypt, circa 150 A.D. His most lasting monument was the Geographia, a summation of the geographical knowledge of the world as it was known in his time, possibly illustrated with maps, but certainly incorporating the technical data necessary to create them. With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the text was lost to western scholars until about 1406 when the scholar Jacobo d’Angelo prepared a Latin translation of a Greek manuscript.
The rediscovery prompted great excitement; numerous manuscript copies were made, many of them containing maps from Ptolemy’s calculations. Later, with the invention of printing - particularly printing from engraved plates - Ptolemy’s text, and the accompanying maps, formed the basis of the earliest printed atlases.
This printing plate was published by Arnold Buckinck in Rome in 1478; his was the second printed edition of Ptolemy with maps, but the first version, issued in 1477, is so rare as to be unobtainable, leaving this as the oldest map of Persia acquirable by a collector. The present example is from the third printing of the atlas, which took place in 1507. It shows all of Persia and part of Turkmenistan, to the southeast of the Caspian Sea.