Terrae Yemen

Title

Terrae Yemen

Description

Map of the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula.

dated 1774

Artist

Lotter (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

Arabia, an early empire on the largely uninhabitable Arabian Peninsula, was the legendary Saba in the south, which at times ruled all of southwest Arabia and had colonies in Eritrea and Tanzania. In the seventh century, Islam became the dominant religion on the peninsula. The Islamic prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 and began preaching in the city in 610, but immigrated to Medina in 622. Mohammed founded a new unified polity on the Arabian Peninsula which, under the subsequent caliphates of Rashidun and Umayyads, experienced a century of rapid expansion of Arab power far beyond the Arabian Peninsula in the form of a vast Muslim Arab Empire with an expanding sphere of influence from the northwest Indian subcontinent across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, South Italy and the Iberian Peninsula to the Pyrenees. Despite its spiritual significance, Arabia soon became politically a fringe region of the Islamic world, with the main medieval Islamic states located at different times in cities as distant as Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo. However, from the 10th century (and indeed until the 20th century) the Hashemite Sharifs of Mecca retained a state in the most developed part of the region, the Hejaz. Their domain originally included only the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, but was extended to the rest of the Hejaz in the 13th century. Although the Sharifs in the Hejaz exercised largely independent authority, they were usually subject to the suzerainty of one of the great Islamic empires of the time. In the Middle Ages, this included the Abbasids of Baghdad and the Fatimids, Ayyubids and Mamluks of Egypt.