Africae

Title

Africae

Description

Map of Africa.

ca. 1760

Artist

Lotter/ de l´Isle (1717-1777)

Tobias Conrad Lotter ( 1717- 1777) was a carthographer and publisher in Augsburg. He married the elder daughter of Matthäus Seutters and worked in the company of his father in la was map maker. He produced under the „ eye“ of M. Seutter his first „ Asia minor“ atlas between 1740 and 1744. The Asia minor altas of Lotter, Praecipua orbis terrarum imperia, regna et provincias, Germania potissimum tabelli 80 exactae delineatis sistens usui militiae ducum ac peregrinantium maxime accommodatus opera contains 63 maps, mosly Lotters work and other maps from Seutter where he put his name in the lower margin.

Historical Description

According to the "Out-of-Africa theory", Africa is considered the "cradle of mankind", where homo development led to the development of the anatomically modern human Homo sapiens. One of the earliest advanced civilizations in mankind was formed in ancient Egypt. Over the millennia, various "great empires" such as the Empire of Abyssinia emerged on the continent. There were other kingdoms in West Africa, such as the Ashanti and Haussa, but they emerged much later. There were also some important cultures in East and South Africa, as in the area of today's Sudan, then called Nubia or Kush. Nubian pharaohs ruled all of Egypt for a dynasty. For example, the inhabitants of Greater Zimbabwe were important cultures in southern Africa. This stone castle was architecturally a masterpiece at that time and important for trade between the peoples of the south and east. The Swahili were known in East Africa. North Africa was connected to Europe and the Near East by the Mediterranean rather than separated. Carthage, a foundation of the Phoenicians in what is now Tunisia, was around the middle of the 1st millennium BC. The dominant power in the western Mediterranean until it was replaced by Rome in the Punic Wars. This prevailed from 30 BC. BC (conquest of Egypt) over all of North Africa. Even the ancient Egyptians (Queen Hatshepsut) made trips to Punt, probably in what is now Somalia. The kingdom of the Queen of Sheba, which probably had its center in southern Arabia, is said to have spanned parts of the Horn from Africa to the north of Ethiopia.