Southern Africa.

This fascinating hand colored 1809 map by Edinburgh cartographer John Pinkerton depicts Southern Africa. Covers Africa from Angola south to the Cape Colony (modern South Africa) and east to the Kingdom of Mongall (modern day Mozambique) and the island of Madagascar. Reflecting the somewhat limited knowledge of the African interior available to European cartographers of the period, only three areas are illustrated with any detail - the Congo, the Cape Colony (South Africa) and the former Kingdom of Monomotapa, which roughly overlaps modern day Mozambique. The Congo had been actively mapped and exploited by Portuguese merchants as early as the 14th century. South Africa, similarly, had an active Dutch and English presence since the earliest days of African Colonization. The ancient Kingdom of Monomotapa, here part of the Empire of the Bororos and divided into Sabia, Sofala, Munhay and Manica, appears on most early maps of Africa. Already a great trading Empire when Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good hope in the 1490s, Monomotapa or the regions between the Sabia, Sofala and Zambezi River systems, had long been associated with legends of King Solomon's Mines and the Biblical lands

Date

1809

Place

Africa

Archive

Wikimedia Commons

Type

map

Original size

4,000 × 2,935 pixels

Need maps for a whole project? Add Find Any Map to Claude and ask for this one by its id: 236413.