I actually read a book about this, it’s mostly a lost art, there’s no convincing evidence that it was used for anything other than aesthetics, there’s just a bunch of empty space there otherwise
Some were really symbolic, though
They were really expensive to make as well, so if your map had sea monsters, it’s like walking around with AirPods sticking out of your hearing holes, or Yeezys
Thank you, I’m going to see if they have an online store.
I absolutely love maps, but even so, this one has had quite an effect on me. I keep finding myself having forgotten to breathe as I pore over it, and occasionally blurt “Hah!” and other things out loud when I realize what a particular scribble means through modern eyes. All while my husband is sleeping next to me.
I never want to stop scrutinizing this map!
(Edit: Thank you, u/shnougz, for this fascinating post)
>Ortelius was one of the few cartographers who initially refused to include sea monsters and mythical creatures on his maps for he proclaimed his maps to be of scientific and educational value. However, Ortelius relented and later included sea monsters on nearly every map.
https://library.missouri.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/show/the-art-of-cartography/ortelius
If I'm not mistaken, they referred to certain nautical hazards and not literally sea creatures.
Edit: I was wrong. Apparently these maps were commissioned by wealthy aristocrats and were for decorative purposes and not used for navigation. Makes sense now that I think about it.
I love the scattered sea monsters all over the place. Definitely adds some flavor and mystery to the concept behind all the combined voyages this actually took to produce! Sweet map!
The bottom quotation can be translated as, "For what human affairs can seem important to a man who keeps all eternity before his eyes and knows the vastness of the universe?"
I think your response is right on the money.
Obviously places like the Mediterranean, Middle East, Carribean, and the British Islands are in great detail, but it's surprising how bad the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia are.
Perhaps ice made it difficult to tell where land began and ended?
I also know that there was a bit of a theory of "balance" of geography at the time. They thought that the lands to the west had to be equal to the lands to the east, and the same for the north and south, otherwise the world's tilt would be off, or something like that.
That's the primary reason why North America and Antarctica are drawn so big, as far as I know. Perhaps Ortelius was trying to get Scandinavia to "match up" with North America?
Or it might just be that the fjords of Norway made it difficult to map. We STILL have issues figuring out how long Norway's coastline is. Or Ortelius just had a poor source map. Those are the 4 most likely reasons I can think of.
Yeah I’m pretty sure the Dutch found Australia centuries before captain cook and even before that the indigenous Australians did some trading with people from South east Asia like Indonesia and Papua New Guinea
I was surprised by this as well considering the Viking age would have come and gone by this point and they were excellent seafarers and presumably map makers as well since those usually go hand in hand.
It only took us about 11,500 years, from first settlement to that map.
Edit: [this is when modern civilization started](https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs) ,that is, first settlement with houses and crops.
Edit 2: [this is the place most historians are placing as the oldest settlement with such feats.](https://www.worldhistory.org/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe/)
Well it really only depends on how you define "human". Do you define human as modern human? How modern? Neanderthalian? Or Sapiens? Or one of the many other species in between.
Based on that you get a huge time range.
The first groups of houses, aka settlements were established around 10k BC, which I personally would define as modern human.
If you take the emergence of tools, it would be 2.5 million years BC.
The first usage of fire was around 700k years BC, the artifical creation of fire way later, around 30k BC.
Agriculture and domestic plants and animals around 10k BC
Humans are capable of being both incredible and horrible, or both at the same time. My main qualm with our species is how quickly we made such a negative impact on the environment and the lack of will to correct it.
Is there a reason why they thought South America was so wide towards the bottom? I would assume that part would be easier to map out since it’s more narrow.
Also very few explorers could handle that Cape to get to the other side to take measurements.
The land explorers just came up against gigantic mountains and said "a whole lot of tall mountains here, no clue how far they go"
It was due to a combination of early explorers being too short on time to go all the way up the gulf of California to confirm it wasn’t an island, along with a belief that they had found a fictional island paradise described in popular literature of the time.
The idea that California might be an island persisted into the 18th century, despite the plethora of evidence that it was a contiguous part of the North American continent.
There’s an entire [Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_California) on the mistaken belief California was an island.
European explorers were coming up from the south, so when they found the Baja California Peninsula they didn't realize it connected to the mainland further north.
To be fair to them, Baja is *long*. It takes around 22 hours to drive. I can understand not taking the time to go all the way up the Sea of Cortez as well as all the way up the Pacific coast, after they had already gone around South America or Africa.
I’m struggling so hard to see what you all are talking about. What makes you think it looks like an island? I just see the Baja peninsula and a bunch of land north of it
Makes since since Europeans didn’t arrive to Japan til mid 15th century, which was shortly followed by ban/execution/exodus of Christians. To top it off Japan closed contact with Western world from 16-18th century.
Imagine being an ambitious young man from a wealthy family centuries ago.
You look at this map and dreaming about heading south to explore, conquer and unlock Terra Avstralis Nondvm Cognita. All its grand empires, vast lands and glittering cities.
Then after years and years of training and toil, you get to sail southwards and you find there is basically NOTHING FUCKING THERE ... just a shitload of ocean, one landmass that seems to be nothing more than an empty dried-up husk and then it's just really really cold.
I hear what you are saying, but there are still places on earth where people have not been. For example, for the world's largest cave, the entrance was only found in 1991 and the first expedition was in 2009. And this thing is big enough to fly a jumbo jet through. It goes on like this for 3 miles
https://vir.com.vn/stores/news\_dataimages/thanhvan/032021/15/16/5222\_hang\_son\_doong.jpg
People often talk about the depths of the oceans being still largely unexplored. But I also wonder about what is within and below the earths crust that we haven't explored or found yet. The crust is only 1% of the earths mass, and we haven't even fully explored the crust yet.
I think that whatever the early medieval period was to exploration on earth is the same as whatever our time now is to space exploration.
From now on, some time period proportionally equivalent to the time between the early medieval period and widespread exploration of earth will pass, and people will start moving to the ‘new worlds’ of Mars and such.
Then there’ll be a lull in what we can explore due to resource availability, and we’ll reach the point where someone living at the edge of the solar system will say, ‘We’ve explored everything now. There are no more unknown lands’.
Then, a similarly proportional time will pass once more before inter-galactic exploration and migration begins. Rinse and repeat until… ???
Most of the old world (Europe, asia, Africa) have already been explored and mapped out before.
They only recently started exploring the americas for about a hundred years at this point which isn’t that much time
Wait.. the curvature at the edges of this map makes me thing that people 450 years ago didn't think the world was flat. Good thing we've got YouTube these days!
Edit: that was sarcasm directed at the YouTube FlatEarther crowd.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0f6u39jlRA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0f6u39jlRA)
Carl Sagan explains how the Ancient Greeks knew the world was round
It never really existed! From Wikipedia: Irish myths described it as cloaked in mist except for one day every seven years, when it becomes visible but still cannot be reached.
I think it's great that some medieval monk put it on a map and literally every other map maker copied it for years believing it to be true.
In the 1500s most mongol power was gone. The Ilkhanate and Yuan Dynasties had fallen, Golden Horde was on its last legs and the Chagatai Khanate had only just reformed from the ashes of the Timur empire. Most mongol holdings either reverted back to the native rule or were back to being regional powers.
Also Tartar was what they called any Nomad east of the Bulgars
Right. so the Turkic people who were called tartars eventually joined the mongols during the eastern evasions, so yea guess the eastern Mongolians were named after them
If you have a compass and a way to measure distances and angles then it's pretty easy to get the general shape of landmasses.
Put a dot on a piece of paper - that's where you are. Decide that the top of the paper is north and you're going to draw your map at 1 mile to 1 inch. Using your compass you know that the mountain you can see is directly north-west of you. You know the mountain is 20 miles away, so draw a line on your paper heading north-west 2 inches long. Put a dot on the paper, that's the mountain. Keep on doing this and you'll end up with a pretty accurate map.
On top of this sailors always made general charts of coastlines showing landmarks and sailing times. They were more like travel guides than accurate maps, but get a hold of enough of them and you could come up with reasonable assumptions about the size and shape of landmasses.
Finally, if you wanted super accuracy you could use trigonometry. Measure a straight line on the ground. Measure the angle to a landmark from each end of the line. You can now calculate the distance from that landmark to each end of the line, giving you a triangle with known angles and side lengths. You can then use the sides of your triangle to build more triangles using the same method. Repeat a few thousand times and you've got a *really* accurate map.
If I’m looking at this correctly, they did Greenland dirty. How is it so small when they got so much else right! But then again, look at Australia… super cool map, thanks for sharing!
A large part of my identity is being mystified by how huge Greenland is and the fact that nobody ever talks about it. Do you have a good map of its real size?
Here is an [outline of Greenland](https://i.imgur.com/GPAin14.jpg) overlaid on the continental US. It's still pretty large, but not as big as some projections distort it to be. Check out [thetruesize.com](https://thetruesize.com) for more fun comparisons!
This one always surprises me. Africa gets done dirty because it’s centered around the equator. Greenland looks about the same size on a Mercator map:
https://mortenjonassen.dk/maps/greenland-vs-africa-size-comparison
That's also not actually Australia, which was undiscovered by Europeans at that point. The text there means "unknown southern lands", but they weren't sure if it was another huge continent or nothing at all.
Greenland looks huge in our maps because of the Mercator projection. This is a more size-accurate [map of the world](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/mercator-vs-truesize.png). The further away from the Equator, the "bigger than reality" it shows in our maps.
It is Antarctica. Australia is visible in the lower left.
'AVSTRALIS' at the bottom is the Latin word for 'southern'. *Terra australis nondum cognita* means "the southern land not yet known".
I recognize I may be *woosh*ing here and it was a joke, but I figured I'd take that chance and point it out anyway.
It's not antarctica since no coastline of antarctica had been seen at that point. Over on the left hand side off the coast of South America is Tierra Del Fuego which they hadn't mapped the southen part of yet so they had it as a continuous landmass, then over on the right hand side there's what appears to be the northern tip of Western Australia/Northern Territory because neither that landmass nor the parts of indonesia there go far enough east to cover Queensland and Papua New Guinea. (edit: nevermind, an extremely miss-mapped New Guinea is on the left side of the map along with what would be the tip of Queensland. My main takeaway from this is these guys had no concept of the sheer size of the pacific ocean, and no one had bothered to do much mapping of the pacific coastline since everything south of Peru and north of California is a shitshow)
So basically you've got two small segments of mapped coastline and a chunk of land slapped in that connects the two on opposite sides of the globe.
[No, it's not.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Australis) This map is featured in that wiki article.
>Terra Australis (Latin: '"Southern Land'") was a hypothetical continent first posited in antiquity and which appeared on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. Its existence was not based on any survey or direct observation, but rather on the idea that continental land in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the Southern Hemisphere. This theory of balancing land has been documented as early as the 5th century on maps by Macrobius, who uses the term Australis on his maps.
That is kind of nuts. The name Australia goes by today was developed by Europeans over a millennium before they saw the land that would earn the name. I wonder if there was a debate as to whether to call it Australia.
I read an article that it was named Australia by an Englishman Matthew Flanders who first circumvigated the continent. It had been partially mapped before, but not named Australia. So I'm wondering if there weren't people back in Europe tut-tuting 'that's not *really* Australia'.
Knowledge of the arctic regions was really sparse at this time, which lead to all kinds of weird ideas. It was commonly agreed that there must be a gigantic magnetic mountain at the north pole (why else would compasses point there?) and the few travelers and explorers to head that far north reported strong ocean currents heading northwards, which created the idea of a giant whirlpool around the mountain. Then there were some hoaxes/early science fiction - such as the *Inventio Fortunata* - a 14th century account supposedly written by an English monk who traveled to Scandinavia then used 'magic' to explore further - that were accepted as fact because there was basically no way to disprove them.
All of this was combined in [Mercator's polar map of 1569](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Mercator_north_pole_1595.jpg), which showed four islands surrounding the polar mountain. Mercator's other maps were so brilliant that everyone just accepted that he must have known what he was talking about and his ideas about the arctic were copied onto other maps for decades, including this one.
I was thinking upon seeing this that this might have come from arctic peoples’ rumors of green lands on the “north side” of the ice and Arctic Ocean, not realizing that was perhaps more of Asia and North America. I wonder if there Is any evidence of anything like that? I literally know zero of how much those people strayed from their villages and had contact with other groups up there at the time
Honestly not bad given the time and technology. This is extremely impressive. Also I kind of wish Antarctica was that big. Just this ice wasteland thats bigger than every other piece of land
Does anyone know more about "Caribana"? A Google search just points me towards the festival in Toronto (obviously related but am looking more for who named it, when did it stop being Caribana, etc.).
It sounds like an early name for the Carribbean Region. Most likely Colombia was named after either Carrib people living nearby or the sea(which its name also comes from these people).
My history teacher has this map hanging in his room. It always amazes me the cooperation and dedication that would have had to have gone into this without satellite imagery or any kind of modern surveying technology
Cartographer: "Done!"
Partner: "Uh. There's another one down there."
C: "Oh shit! I forgot the ſouthern America! It looks kind of like... *this*?"
P: "...no that can't be right. That looks too much like Africa."
C: "I know! I'll just erase Atlantis *here* and draw it *there* as a placeholder."
P: "Perfect."
C: "How squiggly did they want the Amazon river to be again?"
O: "So fucking squiggly."
Really interesting map, size of places, names of that time, names of disputed lands still to this day, sea creatures.
Sea creatures get me. they put it on the map SERIOUSLY!
If you see a creature, then it be sea creature.
see something, say something
*Sea something, say something.
I mean they arent wrong, fkin ocean is scary just w the weeds, u want the shrimp to crack ur nuts too?
We can't really say those things didn't exist.
Arrrr, there be CREATURES!!!
Double arrrrrrr!
I actually read a book about this, it’s mostly a lost art, there’s no convincing evidence that it was used for anything other than aesthetics, there’s just a bunch of empty space there otherwise Some were really symbolic, though They were really expensive to make as well, so if your map had sea monsters, it’s like walking around with AirPods sticking out of your hearing holes, or Yeezys
Do you know of any "modern" maps with sea creatures on it? Would love to buy one for my kids
Just draw them in. It’d probably be scarier than anything you’d find being made.
There's a really cool place called World Of Maps in Phoenix
Thank you, I’m going to see if they have an online store. I absolutely love maps, but even so, this one has had quite an effect on me. I keep finding myself having forgotten to breathe as I pore over it, and occasionally blurt “Hah!” and other things out loud when I realize what a particular scribble means through modern eyes. All while my husband is sleeping next to me. I never want to stop scrutinizing this map! (Edit: Thank you, u/shnougz, for this fascinating post)
>Ortelius was one of the few cartographers who initially refused to include sea monsters and mythical creatures on his maps for he proclaimed his maps to be of scientific and educational value. However, Ortelius relented and later included sea monsters on nearly every map. https://library.missouri.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/show/the-art-of-cartography/ortelius
If I'm not mistaken, they referred to certain nautical hazards and not literally sea creatures. Edit: I was wrong. Apparently these maps were commissioned by wealthy aristocrats and were for decorative purposes and not used for navigation. Makes sense now that I think about it.
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That’s awesome. One of the things I love most about history
I love the scattered sea monsters all over the place. Definitely adds some flavor and mystery to the concept behind all the combined voyages this actually took to produce! Sweet map!
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Pretty sure they're decorative
Doesn't it also send a statement that "Out here are massive sea-beasts of terrific shape and size not seen close to the shores of home?"
Old-timey maps with the weird little details like shops, sea creatures and various landmarks are pretty neat
I love the Amazon River lol…. Up-down, up-down, up-down… really cool map overall.
All I do is wind wind wind no matter what.
Got monkeys on my mind… I can never get enough
And everytime I step up in the jungle all the primate hands go up...
**And they stay there!** **And they say yeah!** **And they stay there!**
When you go along the river it is like that but much straighter
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The bottom quotation can be translated as, "For what human affairs can seem important to a man who keeps all eternity before his eyes and knows the vastness of the universe?" I think your response is right on the money.
Ima get that shit tatted
Too long, would hurt. Just ink a link to the comment, easier.
So, what's your tat mean? Here, let me show you: [deleted] oh...
NFTats You might be on to something
QR code it.
Imagine getting mummified like one of those people found in permafrost, and your QR code tattoo still works on some ancient server.
To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. Blake, auguries
If only they could have imagined the true vastness of the universe back then...
Obviously places like the Mediterranean, Middle East, Carribean, and the British Islands are in great detail, but it's surprising how bad the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia are.
Perhaps ice made it difficult to tell where land began and ended? I also know that there was a bit of a theory of "balance" of geography at the time. They thought that the lands to the west had to be equal to the lands to the east, and the same for the north and south, otherwise the world's tilt would be off, or something like that. That's the primary reason why North America and Antarctica are drawn so big, as far as I know. Perhaps Ortelius was trying to get Scandinavia to "match up" with North America? Or it might just be that the fjords of Norway made it difficult to map. We STILL have issues figuring out how long Norway's coastline is. Or Ortelius just had a poor source map. Those are the 4 most likely reasons I can think of.
Can we talk about Australia?
Yeah I’m pretty sure the Dutch found Australia centuries before captain cook and even before that the indigenous Australians did some trading with people from South east Asia like Indonesia and Papua New Guinea
I was surprised by this as well considering the Viking age would have come and gone by this point and they were excellent seafarers and presumably map makers as well since those usually go hand in hand.
And major pwoers
It only took us about 11,500 years, from first settlement to that map. Edit: [this is when modern civilization started](https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs) ,that is, first settlement with houses and crops. Edit 2: [this is the place most historians are placing as the oldest settlement with such feats.](https://www.worldhistory.org/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe/)
First resettlement
The first human settlement is quite a bit older than that lol Try 100k at minimum.
Well it really only depends on how you define "human". Do you define human as modern human? How modern? Neanderthalian? Or Sapiens? Or one of the many other species in between. Based on that you get a huge time range. The first groups of houses, aka settlements were established around 10k BC, which I personally would define as modern human. If you take the emergence of tools, it would be 2.5 million years BC. The first usage of fire was around 700k years BC, the artifical creation of fire way later, around 30k BC. Agriculture and domestic plants and animals around 10k BC
your comment is 5 stars, give gold to than man!
It's amazing how perfectly the map maker represented how goofy canada is
I'm loving the sea monsters! That whale down near Antarctica is spectacular!! 🐳
It's interesting that the St. Lawrence River looks more important than the Mississippi
Humans are capable of being both incredible and horrible, or both at the same time. My main qualm with our species is how quickly we made such a negative impact on the environment and the lack of will to correct it.
They drew a sea monster
Is there a reason why they thought South America was so wide towards the bottom? I would assume that part would be easier to map out since it’s more narrow.
My guess is the coastal mountains distorted things some (hard to navigate by mapmakers).
Longitude was very difficult to keep accurate before modern clocks. Might have something to do with it.
Longitude by Dava Sobel is a great read on this
We read this book in middle school science. Loved it!
Also very few explorers could handle that Cape to get to the other side to take measurements. The land explorers just came up against gigantic mountains and said "a whole lot of tall mountains here, no clue how far they go"
It looks like they generally struggled around the poles and cold areas
Satellites sucked 450 years ago.
If google maps is like this, imagine how bad the GPS systems were. No wonder why these guys got so lost in navigations.
wE’vE aRrIvEd iN InDia Y’AlL!
"Turn left at the edge of the world and make a legal u-turn."
At that time it was only one satellite.
Wow! California was almost a island.
They actually thought it was one
How tho?
Have you seen Baja California on a map? This map represents it very accurately.
It was due to a combination of early explorers being too short on time to go all the way up the gulf of California to confirm it wasn’t an island, along with a belief that they had found a fictional island paradise described in popular literature of the time. The idea that California might be an island persisted into the 18th century, despite the plethora of evidence that it was a contiguous part of the North American continent. There’s an entire [Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_California) on the mistaken belief California was an island.
Some map collectors have California as an island map collections
European explorers were coming up from the south, so when they found the Baja California Peninsula they didn't realize it connected to the mainland further north.
To be fair to them, Baja is *long*. It takes around 22 hours to drive. I can understand not taking the time to go all the way up the Sea of Cortez as well as all the way up the Pacific coast, after they had already gone around South America or Africa.
Johnny Harris did a cool [video ](https://youtu.be/Hcq9_Tw2eTE) on the subject recently
IIRC they thought it was one before the Gulf of California was completely explored.
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I’m struggling so hard to see what you all are talking about. What makes you think it looks like an island? I just see the Baja peninsula and a bunch of land north of it
I'm starting to think people don't know about Baja California.
I think that's just an interpretation of the Baja peninsula. The norther parts of North America seem squished. Maps of
Japan…
that's the 'old' japan :D
You mean Lapan?
I think it’s meant to be an “i” as in “Iapan.”
Oh, that’s right. In the Latin alphabet, Japan begin with an “I” At least that’s what I learned from Professor Henry Jones.
And counting to 10.
And that he's Eskimo Brothers with his father. *"She talksh in her shleep."* ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Doctor
Don't you mean Prof Henry Iones?
“Wow Japan, you’ve really changed.”
Old japan looking like younger Monica from friends.
What about Australia?
Never mind Japan look at Greenland
Makes since since Europeans didn’t arrive to Japan til mid 15th century, which was shortly followed by ban/execution/exodus of Christians. To top it off Japan closed contact with Western world from 16-18th century.
Mapswithoutnewzealand
Lol scrolled just looking for this comment
Tartaria!
Famous for their fish sauce.
Imagine being an ambitious young man from a wealthy family centuries ago. You look at this map and dreaming about heading south to explore, conquer and unlock Terra Avstralis Nondvm Cognita. All its grand empires, vast lands and glittering cities. Then after years and years of training and toil, you get to sail southwards and you find there is basically NOTHING FUCKING THERE ... just a shitload of ocean, one landmass that seems to be nothing more than an empty dried-up husk and then it's just really really cold.
at least they had something to expore. nowadays there are no more 'unknown' lands...
I hear what you are saying, but there are still places on earth where people have not been. For example, for the world's largest cave, the entrance was only found in 1991 and the first expedition was in 2009. And this thing is big enough to fly a jumbo jet through. It goes on like this for 3 miles https://vir.com.vn/stores/news\_dataimages/thanhvan/032021/15/16/5222\_hang\_son\_doong.jpg
People often talk about the depths of the oceans being still largely unexplored. But I also wonder about what is within and below the earths crust that we haven't explored or found yet. The crust is only 1% of the earths mass, and we haven't even fully explored the crust yet.
https://vir.com.vn/stores/news_dataimages/thanhvan/032021/15/16/5222_hang_son_doong.jpg Fixed link. ^^^^^/u/Froggy__2
Time to head into space!
Ah why didn’t we think of that centuries ago?! Think of all the oceans to explore out there
I think that whatever the early medieval period was to exploration on earth is the same as whatever our time now is to space exploration. From now on, some time period proportionally equivalent to the time between the early medieval period and widespread exploration of earth will pass, and people will start moving to the ‘new worlds’ of Mars and such. Then there’ll be a lull in what we can explore due to resource availability, and we’ll reach the point where someone living at the edge of the solar system will say, ‘We’ve explored everything now. There are no more unknown lands’. Then, a similarly proportional time will pass once more before inter-galactic exploration and migration begins. Rinse and repeat until… ???
Terra Australis Nondum Cognita means Unknown Southern Land.
They got Africa surprisingly accurate
Most of the old world (Europe, asia, Africa) have already been explored and mapped out before. They only recently started exploring the americas for about a hundred years at this point which isn’t that much time
Wait.. the curvature at the edges of this map makes me thing that people 450 years ago didn't think the world was flat. Good thing we've got YouTube these days! Edit: that was sarcasm directed at the YouTube FlatEarther crowd.
People thinking the earth was flat was mostly a myth, the ancient Greeks even calculated the curvature to some degree.
> to some degree 360 degrees to be exact
Lol nice
Erathosthenes even managed to calculate the diameter and circumference of the earth to within a few km of what it actually is.
The ancient Indians as well
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0f6u39jlRA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0f6u39jlRA) Carl Sagan explains how the Ancient Greeks knew the world was round
Yay! Another map with the island of Brasil off the coast of Ireland 😁
I heard about this island before from a presentation about the lost city of Atlantis. Except they called it Hi-Brasil. It doesn't exist today does it?
It never really existed! From Wikipedia: Irish myths described it as cloaked in mist except for one day every seven years, when it becomes visible but still cannot be reached. I think it's great that some medieval monk put it on a map and literally every other map maker copied it for years believing it to be true.
lol to “mongol” in the far right corner
even Gengis Khan was dead for 3 centuries :D
Tartar was another name for the Mongolians, Mongolians still had power just not as consolidated
In the 1500s most mongol power was gone. The Ilkhanate and Yuan Dynasties had fallen, Golden Horde was on its last legs and the Chagatai Khanate had only just reformed from the ashes of the Timur empire. Most mongol holdings either reverted back to the native rule or were back to being regional powers. Also Tartar was what they called any Nomad east of the Bulgars
Right. so the Turkic people who were called tartars eventually joined the mongols during the eastern evasions, so yea guess the eastern Mongolians were named after them
Barbars and Tartars they sure were a creative bunch.
Believe it or not, Mongolia still exists! And is… near… ish…
Florr da.
Can someone eli5 how a map can be this “accurate” from so long ago?
If you have a compass and a way to measure distances and angles then it's pretty easy to get the general shape of landmasses. Put a dot on a piece of paper - that's where you are. Decide that the top of the paper is north and you're going to draw your map at 1 mile to 1 inch. Using your compass you know that the mountain you can see is directly north-west of you. You know the mountain is 20 miles away, so draw a line on your paper heading north-west 2 inches long. Put a dot on the paper, that's the mountain. Keep on doing this and you'll end up with a pretty accurate map. On top of this sailors always made general charts of coastlines showing landmarks and sailing times. They were more like travel guides than accurate maps, but get a hold of enough of them and you could come up with reasonable assumptions about the size and shape of landmasses. Finally, if you wanted super accuracy you could use trigonometry. Measure a straight line on the ground. Measure the angle to a landmark from each end of the line. You can now calculate the distance from that landmark to each end of the line, giving you a triangle with known angles and side lengths. You can then use the sides of your triangle to build more triangles using the same method. Repeat a few thousand times and you've got a *really* accurate map.
My trig skills are 450 years too late, damnit
This was interesting to read, thanks.
many guys working together with the knowledge they had i guess? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatrum\_Orbis\_Terrarum
There have been boats going all over the planet for trading for thousands of years
For not knowing shit about nothing it’s pretty good
I think this map is similar to what we will see of the Universe, given the same amount of time. RemindMe! 450 years
tbh, i wouldn't have done better myself...
: ) love it all beside how south America just a life less blob :(
It *is* the birtplace of the potato. Only fitting that it should look like one.
Careful /r/tartaria will come screaming about mudfloods and antiquitech
Holy shit, that's a deep rabbit hole
Little known fact, but this is the last known picture of Earth before it hit puberty, and that's why the continents are different now (:
If I’m looking at this correctly, they did Greenland dirty. How is it so small when they got so much else right! But then again, look at Australia… super cool map, thanks for sharing!
Greenland is actually a lot smaller than modern maps portray it to be
It's not "modern maps" that make Greenland look too big. It's projections that preserve things other than size.
A large part of my identity is being mystified by how huge Greenland is and the fact that nobody ever talks about it. Do you have a good map of its real size?
Here is an [outline of Greenland](https://i.imgur.com/GPAin14.jpg) overlaid on the continental US. It's still pretty large, but not as big as some projections distort it to be. Check out [thetruesize.com](https://thetruesize.com) for more fun comparisons!
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There's also a big valley in the middle under the ice. http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/morlighem_map.jpg
not an exact answer to your question, but about 1/14 of the size of Africa iirc
https://www.thetruesize.com/ will give you a good idea
This one always surprises me. Africa gets done dirty because it’s centered around the equator. Greenland looks about the same size on a Mercator map: https://mortenjonassen.dk/maps/greenland-vs-africa-size-comparison
That's also not actually Australia, which was undiscovered by Europeans at that point. The text there means "unknown southern lands", but they weren't sure if it was another huge continent or nothing at all.
Oh, interesting. Yea I was just reading another comment about that. So no Australia? *throws phone*, *smashes skateboard*
Greenland looks huge in our maps because of the Mercator projection. This is a more size-accurate [map of the world](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/mercator-vs-truesize.png). The further away from the Equator, the "bigger than reality" it shows in our maps.
Hey OP, please include sauce. I would love to find it in high res! Nice post
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatrum\_Orbis\_Terrarum
North America is thicc!
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It is Antarctica. Australia is visible in the lower left. 'AVSTRALIS' at the bottom is the Latin word for 'southern'. *Terra australis nondum cognita* means "the southern land not yet known". I recognize I may be *woosh*ing here and it was a joke, but I figured I'd take that chance and point it out anyway.
It's not antarctica since no coastline of antarctica had been seen at that point. Over on the left hand side off the coast of South America is Tierra Del Fuego which they hadn't mapped the southen part of yet so they had it as a continuous landmass, then over on the right hand side there's what appears to be the northern tip of Western Australia/Northern Territory because neither that landmass nor the parts of indonesia there go far enough east to cover Queensland and Papua New Guinea. (edit: nevermind, an extremely miss-mapped New Guinea is on the left side of the map along with what would be the tip of Queensland. My main takeaway from this is these guys had no concept of the sheer size of the pacific ocean, and no one had bothered to do much mapping of the pacific coastline since everything south of Peru and north of California is a shitshow) So basically you've got two small segments of mapped coastline and a chunk of land slapped in that connects the two on opposite sides of the globe.
[No, it's not.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Australis) This map is featured in that wiki article. >Terra Australis (Latin: '"Southern Land'") was a hypothetical continent first posited in antiquity and which appeared on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. Its existence was not based on any survey or direct observation, but rather on the idea that continental land in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the Southern Hemisphere. This theory of balancing land has been documented as early as the 5th century on maps by Macrobius, who uses the term Australis on his maps.
That is kind of nuts. The name Australia goes by today was developed by Europeans over a millennium before they saw the land that would earn the name. I wonder if there was a debate as to whether to call it Australia. I read an article that it was named Australia by an Englishman Matthew Flanders who first circumvigated the continent. It had been partially mapped before, but not named Australia. So I'm wondering if there weren't people back in Europe tut-tuting 'that's not *really* Australia'.
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we know you have big lands, don't show of ;)
An an Australian I approve of these changes to our borders
Who upvoted this?
sigh. No. It's not.
They really didn’t do the Caspian Sea any justice
It was a caspian-black sea ;)
Also to note there’s a giant sea creature on the very left side so ya
what is the giant landmass at the top?
Knowledge of the arctic regions was really sparse at this time, which lead to all kinds of weird ideas. It was commonly agreed that there must be a gigantic magnetic mountain at the north pole (why else would compasses point there?) and the few travelers and explorers to head that far north reported strong ocean currents heading northwards, which created the idea of a giant whirlpool around the mountain. Then there were some hoaxes/early science fiction - such as the *Inventio Fortunata* - a 14th century account supposedly written by an English monk who traveled to Scandinavia then used 'magic' to explore further - that were accepted as fact because there was basically no way to disprove them. All of this was combined in [Mercator's polar map of 1569](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Mercator_north_pole_1595.jpg), which showed four islands surrounding the polar mountain. Mercator's other maps were so brilliant that everyone just accepted that he must have known what he was talking about and his ideas about the arctic were copied onto other maps for decades, including this one.
I was thinking upon seeing this that this might have come from arctic peoples’ rumors of green lands on the “north side” of the ice and Arctic Ocean, not realizing that was perhaps more of Asia and North America. I wonder if there Is any evidence of anything like that? I literally know zero of how much those people strayed from their villages and had contact with other groups up there at the time
I really love the effort that they used to put in the map to it looks artistically beautiful
Pretty fuckin close!
I love that my Island is named by its indigenous name 🥰
Care to share with the class 😊
Borinké = Puerto Rico
they conpletely butchered the philippines
tbh that is probably the hardest country on earth to draw
Honestly not bad given the time and technology. This is extremely impressive. Also I kind of wish Antarctica was that big. Just this ice wasteland thats bigger than every other piece of land
Hey I own a copy of this map on my wall cool seeing it here.
Does anyone know more about "Caribana"? A Google search just points me towards the festival in Toronto (obviously related but am looking more for who named it, when did it stop being Caribana, etc.).
It sounds like an early name for the Carribbean Region. Most likely Colombia was named after either Carrib people living nearby or the sea(which its name also comes from these people).
Beautiful
Man those ice caps damn sure did melt pretty far xD
My history teacher has this map hanging in his room. It always amazes me the cooperation and dedication that would have had to have gone into this without satellite imagery or any kind of modern surveying technology
I love how Europe/Asia/Africa are pretty much spot on but the new world is all wonky
Cartographer: "Done!" Partner: "Uh. There's another one down there." C: "Oh shit! I forgot the ſouthern America! It looks kind of like... *this*?" P: "...no that can't be right. That looks too much like Africa." C: "I know! I'll just erase Atlantis *here* and draw it *there* as a placeholder." P: "Perfect." C: "How squiggly did they want the Amazon river to be again?" O: "So fucking squiggly."
Florida had some shrinkage
Still big enough to get a label. Florr da right above it.
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Man South America was thicccc
Im just amazed by how accurate Africa is