[Fulcanelli]

Munich librarians have found a rare 16th century world map that first gave America its name as a continent. The version by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller survived World War II sandwiched between geometry books.

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This map is older than Piri Reis'

Besides Universalis Cosmographia, Waldseemüller published a set of gores for constructing globes. The gores, also containing the inscription America, are believed to have been printed in the same year as the wall map, since Waldseemüller mentions them in the introduction to his Cosmographiæ Introductio. On the globe gores, the sea to the west of the notional American west coast is named the Occeanus Occidentalis, that is, the Western or Atlantic Ocean, and where it merges with the Oceanus Orientalis (the Eastern, or Indian Ocean) is hidden by the latitude staff. This appears to indicate uncertainty as to America's location, whether it was an island continent in the Atlantic (Western Ocean) or in fact the great peninsula of India Superior shown on earlier maps, such as the 1489 map of the world by Martellus or the 1492 globe of Behaim.
Five copies of the globe gores are extant. The first to be rediscovered was found in 1871 and is now in the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota. Another copy was found inside a Ptolemy atlas and is in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. A third copy was discovered in 1992 bound into an edition of Aristotle in the Stadtbücherei Offenburg, a public library in Germany. A fourth copy came to light in 2003 when its European owner read a newspaper article about the Waldseemüller map. It was sold at auction to Charles Frodsham & Co. for $1,002,267, a world record price for a single sheet map. In July 2012, a statement was released from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich that a fifth copy of the gore had been found in the LMU Library's collection which is somewhat different from the other copies, perhaps because of a later date of printing. LMU Library has made an electronic version of their copy of the map available online.

[zombie-rot420]

Wow really cool.

[Pyramid_Head]

That's just awesome.

[kasapin]

i presume this map was about to get cut and put on a globe... nice.

[dean mclean]

Haha holy shit America is small!
Interesting

[icheerthebull]

nice post. thanks

[spudigitti]

Top notch...

[Arkoquisa]

The Fourth Part of the World by Toby Lester

A must read. The book is about this map.

The picture is of a cut out copy. The maps that came with the book, were separate fold outs stored in a back cover pocket. This one was intended to be cut out, and pasted to a sphere, to make a globe.

[Arkoquisa]

Originally Posted by dean mclean ↗

Haha holy shit America is small!
Interesting

Holy SHIT!!!!

This map was made in 1507. Depicting South America, and the Pacific Ocean... But... Balboa didn't cross Panama and discover the Pacific until 1513...

^This is the TRUE reason why the map is so important.

As a historian, who loves tales of Spanish exploration, discovery, and interaction of native cultures, to the point I have dedicated my life to it, I will let y'all figure out what all happened.


Amerigo noted how natives in Patagonia used snakes bites to the dick as viagra. History is fucking awesome.

[spudigitti]

Originally Posted by Arkoquisa ↗

Holy SHIT!!!!

This map was made in 1507. Depicting South America, and the Pacific Ocean... But... Balboa didn't cross Panama and discover the Pacific until 1513...

^This is the TRUE reason why the map is so important.

As a historian, who loves tales of Spanish exploration, discovery, and interaction of native cultures, to the point I have dedicated my life to it, I will let y'all figure out what all happened.


Amerigo noted how natives in Patagonia used snakes bites to the dick as viagra. History is fucking awesome.

Check out Brendan the navigator...