Facies una Hemi-sphaerii Terrestris. Facies altera Hemi-sphaerii Terrestris.

An extremely rare discovery, this is a wonderful 1693 double hemisphere map of the world in two panels. Both of these maps were drawn and engraved by the German Enlightenment era polymath Johann Zahn for his pseudo-scientific opus Mundus Mirabili, or the “Marvelous World.” This, Zahn’s cartographic masterpiece, is a smorgasbord of carto-curiosity featuring such unusual elements as an insular California, the Great Lakes rendered as a single body of water open to the west, the strait of Anian far to the north, El Dorado or Manoa on the shores of the mythical Lake Parima, the legendary Lago de los Xarayes, an erroneously oriented Caspian Sea, a speculative Ptolemaic mapping of the sources of the Nile, an incomplete Australia, and the five great rivers of southeast Asia radiating from a single apocryphal lake, among others. Our survey of this map will begin with North America on the western hemisphere sheet. North America is rendered according to the common 17th century Dutch conception and owes much to the work of Nicholas Visscher whose maps played a significant role in promoting the “California as an Island” hypothesis. The concept of an insular California first appeared as a work

Date

1696

Archive

Wikimedia Commons

Type

map

Original size

6,000 × 2,433 pixels

Need maps for a whole project? Add Find Any Map to Claude and ask for this one by its id: 21554.