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 woodcut map was prepared by Laurent Fries for his small folio edition of the ‘Geographia’, which he first published in 1522; on a smaller format than previous versions, it might be considered the first “popular” edition of the Geographia; even so, only a limited number of people would have been able to afford the book.
This map first appeared in the 1525, second edition. The present example is from the Trechsel’s 1535 edition and is therefore the second printing of this attractive map of Persia.
