digging into more images of this map that was posted over the weekend.
Urbano Monte’s enormous 1587 map is a unique vision of the world as he knew it.
Photographs Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection
The map is made up of 60 individual sheets, like this one showing northern Europe.
Photographs Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection
This sheet shows the islands of Tierra del Fuego (bottom), discovered just a few decades earlier.
Photographs Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection
A bird flies over the Southern Ocean with an elephant in its talons.
Photographs Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection
Monte’s map is filled with animals, like the camels and crocodile shown in this detail from Central Africa.
Photographs Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection
A unicorn (right) and other creatures roam Siberia in this detail from Monte’s map.
Photographs Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection
A merman appears to pay tribute to King Philip II of Spain off the coast of South America.
Photographs Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection
To digitize the map, the team scanned all 60 sheets and began assembling them as a series of five concentric rings. Four sheets make up the innermost ring.
Photographs Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection
At this stage of assembly, two more rings have been added.
Photographs Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection
This is the map with all five concentric rings of sheets stitched together.
Photographs Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection
Monte’s map was re-projected so it could be aligned with the modern globe in Google Earth.
Photographs Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection
By Greg Miller
PUBLISHED December 7, 2017
This colorful and intricately detailed map from 1587 is more than nine feet by nine feet when fully assembled. For the last 430 years, its 60 individual sheets were bound together as an atlas, but now they have finally been put together—digitally—to reveal a complete picture of the world as it was understood at the time.
And what a world it was. The map is packed with fantastical creatures, from unicorns in Siberia to mermen frollicking in the Southern Ocean and a terrifying bird flying off with an elephant in its talons. The map reflects the geographical knowledge (and misconceptions) of its time, but in some ways it’s surprisingly advanced. It portrays the Earth as it would be seen looking directly down on the North Pole from space, a perspective not commonly used by mapmakers until the 20th century.
https://archive.is/PoakK
https://www.davidrumsey.com/blog/2017/11/26/largest-early-world-map-monte-s-10-ft-planisphere-of-1587
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/12/cartography-gigantic-ancient-map-urbano-monte/
https://archive.is/nraFn