Tabula Asiae IX

Title

Tabula Asiae IX

Description

Map shows Pakistan with the river Indus, Afgansitan and partly Iran.

ca. 1550

Artist

Ptolemy/Münster Sebastian (1489-1552)

Sebastian Münster (1488 – 1552) belongs tot he very important Comographers oft he Renaicance. He issued his first famous Cosmographia in 1544 with 24 double paged maps with German description of the world.It had numerous editions in different languages including Latin, French, Italian, English, and Czech. The last German edition was published in 1628, long after his death. The Cosmographia was one of the most successful and popular books of the 16th century. It passed through 24 editions in 100 years. This success was due to the notable woodcuts ,some by Hans Holbein the Younger, Urs Graf, Hans Rudolph Deutsch, and David Kandel. It was most important in reviving geography in 16th-century Europe.His first geographic works were Germania descriptio (1530) and Mappa Europae (1536). In 1540 he published a Latin edition of Ptolemy's Geographia with illustrations. The 1550 edition contains cities, portraits, and costumes. These editions, printed in Germany, are the most valued of the Cosmographias. Claudius Ptolemy (arround 100- 160 a.C.) Geographia, gives a list of geographic coordinates of spherical longitude and latitude of almost ten thousand point locations on the earth surface, as they were known at his times. The list is organized in Tabulae which cor- respond to specific regions of the three known continents at that time, Africa, Asia and Europe. Research on Ptolemy’s Geographia has started at the University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in the eighties, focused mainly, but not exclusively, on data re- lated to territories which are now under the sovereignty of the modern Greek state. The World of Ptolemy is classified in Regions, since each Chapter is referred to one of them, giving by this way the concept of Atlas as it is understood today.

Historical Description

Around the middle of the 2nd millennium BC The Aryans from Central Asia invaded Pakistan. They shaped Vedic culture and Hinduism. Today's Pakistani territory already came into contact with Islam in the early 8th century when the Arabs conquered the Indus Valley under Muhammad ibn al-Qasim in 712. For centuries the border between the Islamic world and the Indian culture was east of the Indus. The Punjab initially remained outside the Muslim sphere of influence. It was only around 1000 that the Turkish Ghaznavid dynasty extended its empire to the whole of Pakistan and parts of northern India. Until the beginning of the 19th century, Pakistan was part of various Islamic empires, including those of the Persian Ghurids (12th and 13th centuries), the North Indian Delhi Sultans (13th and 14th centuries) and Mughals (16th to 18th centuries) ) and the Afghan Durrani dynasty (18th and 19th centuries).