Tabula nona Asiae continentur, Aria, Paropanisadae, Drangiana, Arachosia, und Gedrosia. 23

Title

Tabula nona Asiae continentur, Aria, Paropanisadae, Drangiana, Arachosia, und Gedrosia. 23

Description

Trapezoidal map depicts a large part of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, including adjacent regions of Iran. It is from the edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia edited by Michael Servetus, known as Villanovanus, and based on the edition by Laurent Fries of 1522, which in turn reproduced the famous 1513 edition by Martin Waldseemüller. The maps in this edition are presented in a reduced format, but with significant differences in the title, marginal text, and verso.

ca. 1541

Artist

Ptolemy / Fries Claudius / Laurent (Lorenz) (1490-1531)

Lorenz (Laurent) Fries was born in Alsace in 1490 or thereabouts, describing himself on one occasion as from Colmar, one of the towns of the region. He studied medicine at university, or rather at universities, as he seems to have had a peripatetic education, apparently spending time at the universities of Pavia, Piacenza, Montpellier and Vienna. Having successfully completed his education, Fries established himself as a physician, at a succession of places in the Alsace region, with a short spell in Switzerland, before settling in Strasbourg, in about 1519. By this time, he had established a reputation as a writer on medical topics, with several publications already to his credit. Indeed, it was thus that Fries met the Strasbourg printer and publisher Johann Grüninger, an associate of the St. Die group of scholars formed by, among others, Walter Lud, Martin Ringmann and Martin Waldseemuller. Gruninger was responsible for printing several of the maps prepared by Waldseemuller, and for supervising the cutting of the maps for the 1513 edition of Ptolemy, edited by the group. This meeting was to introduce a important digression into Fries' life, and for the next five years, from about 1520 to about 1525, he worked in some capacity as a cartographic editor with Gruninger, exploiting the corpus of material that Waldseemuller had created. The first edition of Ptolemy's Geographia editet by Fries was published in Strasbourg in 1522, with maps that were copied and re-engraved from those of Martin Waldseemüller of the 1520 edition of Ptolemy and text edited by Pirckheimer. In 1525 a second edition was printed in Strasbourg. At the death of Fries and Gruninger, the plates were purchased by the brother Melchior and Gaspar Treschel, who printed a thord edition in Lyon in 1535. For the text, the two editors used the supervision of Michael Servetus, who editet Pirckheimer's text. Finally, in 1541, Gaspare Treechsel published in Vienne, in the Dauphine, this fourth edition, again with Servetus' text. in this edition, compared to the first edition of Strasbourg in 1522, the text underwent numerous changes, corrections and additions, but the wood-Blocks were not changed. 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

In ancient times, the area of today's Afghanistan, which corresponds to the east of the ancient "Aryānām Xšaθra", belonged to the Persian Empire. Later, a Greek-Bactrian kingdom emerged in Bactria, which was ruled by the descendants of the troops of Alexander the Great. The history of modern Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the national history of the Pashtuns. Countless Pashtun uprisings against the respective rulers (Persian Safavids and Indian Moguls) finally led to the uprising of the Ghilzai tribe (1719) to overthrow the Safavids in Persia (1722). This Pashtun victory did not last long. Only seven years later they were defeated by Nader Shah and pushed back to Kandahar. With the subsequent conquests of Nader Shah (1736–1747), the Persian Empire temporarily regained control of the region that is now called Afghanistan. Pashtune Ahmad Shah Durrani founded an independent Pashtun kingdom in the east of his empire in 1747 after the death of Nader Shah Afshar, which can be seen as the predecessor of the modern state of Afghanistan. He is generally considered the founder of Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Russian and British colonial interests (The Great Game) clashed. Since the establishment of the Imperial Russian Navy by Tsar Peter the Great, the goal of Russian expansion policy has been to advance to the Indian Ocean and build an ice-free port there. In order to forestall Russia, Afghanistan should be conquered and annexed to what would later become British India as part of the British Empire. The British were able to occupy the country, but were unable to achieve their goals. As early as October 1842, the British troops withdrew from Kabul and subsequently from Afghanistan. Since 1933, there was a constitutional kingdom headed by Mohammed Zahir Shah (Mohammedzai). Zahir Shah ushered in a democratic turn in Afghanistan.