Maps > Africa & Middle East (17 items)
 
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ARROWSMITH, John (1790-1873)

Eastern Frontier of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, (and part of Kafirland) From Algoa Bay to the Great Kei River. Chiefly from M.S. Surveys & Sketches communicated by Lt. Col. Mitchell late Survr. Genl. of the Colony and Captn. Wm. F. Drummond Jervois Royl. Engrs

London: J. Arrowsmith, 4th June 1851. Copper-engraved map, with original outline colour, printed on wove wove paper, in excellent condition . Sheet size: 21 3/4 x 26 7/8 inches.

A beautiful map of the eastern coast of South Africa, by the celebrated English mapmaker, John Arrowsmith.

John Arrowsmith was the nephew of Aaron Arrowsmith, the founder of the great British cartographical firm. It was John who energetically continued the company's forward position in the world of new geography and maintained the firm's reputation for handsome, elegant maps. John first came to London in 1810 and immediately joined his uncle's cartographic firm. His first publication was his celebrated London Atlas, which became one of the most admired atlases of the period. In the tradition of the great Dutch mapmakers, Arrowsmith republished his London Atlas in three editions, each with added improvements and corrections. His maps of Texas and Australia are amongst the most important of his publications and record some of the earliest delineations of those regions. He was one of the founders of the Royal Geographical Society and served on the council until he retired. In 1863 he received the patron's gold medal for his contribution to geographic sciences.

This elegant map of South Africa is a wonderful example of Arrowsmith's meticulous style and remains one of the finest nineteenth century maps of the area. This is a fantastic early map of South Africa's eastern coast, stretching from Port Elizabeth to the mouth of the Great Kei River. In the lower right corner is an inset map of the whole country, showing the county divisions and the principal towns. There are a wealth of topographical detail as well as geographical comments and tribe locations.

Dictionary of National Biography.

#14852$1,200.00
 
 
D'ANVILLE, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon (1697-1782)

Africa, with All Its States, Kingdomes, Republics, Regions, Island &c. Improved and inlarged from D'Anville's map to which have been added a particular chart of the Gold Coast [on an inset larger scale map] wherein are distinguished all the european forts and factories by S. Boulton and also a summary description relative to the trade and natural produce, manners and customs of the African continent and islands

London: Robert Laurie & James Whittle, 1794. Copper-engraved map, on four joined sheets, with original outline colour, some splits to old folds, small tears at margins, one with slight loss, overall in good condition. Sheet size: 41 1/2 x 49 1/4 inches.

A fascinating late eighteenth-century wall map of Africa, after one of France's greatest cartographers

Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville was the spiritual successor to Guillaume De L'Isle in the sense that he maintained the rigorous standard for accuracy that De L'Isle had established. D'Anville was the last French mapmaker to establish an international reputation superior to all his contemporaries, as witnessed by the respect shown by English cartographers and publishers during an era when the two countries were often at war and always hostile to one another.

This excellent map of Africa, an English edition with revisions of D'Anville by Laurie & Whittle, was issued when the European appetite for exploration and colonization of the continent was just getting underway. By this time there were well over fifty fort/trading posts on the western and southeastern coasts representing various European nations, but there had been almost no penetration of the interior (these European `forts & factories' on the Gold Coast are shown in close up on Boulton's inset map). With the gradual outlawing of the slave trade by most civilized nations, interest in the vast interior regions greatly increased as whites sought other profitable resources, and Catholic and Protestant missionaries bravely evangelised.

The peoples of Africa proved much more diverse and intriguing than ever imagined, and some of the discoveries in this regard are included in the extensive texts that are interspersed amongst the geographic features shown on the map.


#10394$2,500.00
 
 
DE L'ISLE, Guillaume (1675-1726)

Carte d'Afrique, Dressee pour l'usage du Roy.

Paris: Chez l'Auteur sur le Quay de l'Horloge du Palais., circa 1730. Copper-engraved map with original outline colour, printed on thick laid paper, in excellent condition. Sheet size: 20 x 26 3/8 inches.

An important early map of Africa by the celebrated French cartographer, Guillaume de L'Isle.

Guillaume de L'Isle was the son of a cartographer and a pupil of Jean Dominique Cassini, who, among other important contributions, aligned the study of astronomy to the study of geography. Under Cassini's direction, observations were made from locations all over the world that enabled longitudinal calculations to be made with much greater accuracy. De l'Isle carried on this exacting work with remarkable dedication and integrity, constantly revising and improving his maps. While precision was his primary goal, his maps are also invariably elegant and attractive.

This map is from an edition of De L'Isle's Atlas de Geographie, which was reissued posthumously from 1730 to 1774. The map covers the whole of Africa including southern Europe and the whole of the Middle East.

Geographical knowledge in Africa was mostly garnered from a few early missionaries, sea captains and traders, who explored the coast, but had no direct knowledge of the interior. Even the great rivers of Africa were for many reasons unexplored by the whites. The huge trade in slaves, ivory, gold and other items took place at coastal forts through middle men. Not until the latter half of the 19th century did any degree of accuracy begin to appear in maps of Africa.

Nevertheless, De l'Isle, characteristically, amassed a great deal of information based on reports about the continent, and some of it is in a general way true: the long thin lake north of the Zambezi corresponds to Lake Tanganyika; two source rivers join to form the Nile; and there are ranges of mountains in the southwest that go down to the Cape.

Moreland and Bannister, Antique Maps p. 132; Tooley's Dictionary of Mapmakers, 395

#17077$1,500.00
 
 
DE L'ISLE, Guillaume (1675-1726)

Carte du Congo et du Pays des Cafres

Amsterdam: Covens & Mortier, [1742]. Copper-engraved map, with oroginal outline colour, in good condition. Sheet size: 21 3/4 x 25 3/4 inches.

A very fine map of southern Africa, by one of France's greatest cartographers

Guillaume de l'Isle (1675-1726) was the son of a cartographer and pupil of Jean Dominique Cassini, who, among other important contributions, aligned the study of astronomy to the study of geography. Under Cassini's direction, observations were made from locations all over the world that enabled longitudinal calculations to be made with much greater accuracy. De l'Isle carried on this exacting work with remarkable dedication and integrity, constantly revising and improving his maps. While precision was his primary goal, his maps are invariably elegant and attractive.

Jean (Johannes) Covens and Corneille (Cornelius) Mortier were brothers-in-law, who carried on the book publishing business established by Pierre Mortier in Amsterdam in 1685. Pierre Mortier's company owed much of its success to his access to French publishers, whose publications he re-issued in handsome editions.The elder Mortier died in 1711; his wife continued the firm until she died in 1719. In 1721, Covens and Mortier formed a partnership, Covens having married Agatha Mortier in the same year. They continued the business by publishing enlarged editions of Sanson, Jaillot, and De L'Isle, as well as some of the later Dutch cartographical masters such as De Wit and Allard, and of course Pierre Mortier.

This map is from an edition of De L'Isle entitled, Atlas Nouveau, Contenant Toutes Les Parties Du Monde, Ou sont exactement Remarquées les Empires, Monarchies, Royaumes, Etats, Republiques &c. Par Guillaume de l'Isle. Premier Géographe de sa Majesté. It encompasses the southern half of Africa, endeavoring to shed some light upon the unknown interior. As De L'Isle indicates in several of his notes, available information was quite uncertain, consisting of heresay and legend. The interior indeed is a vast fictional region with gold and silver mines and mysterious kingdoms. Nevertheless, there had been several centuries' worth of interaction between white traders, mixed settlers and native tribesmen in the Congo, Angola, present day Mozambique and Madagascar. Furthermore, the courses of the Congo River and the Zambezi are accurately drawn fairly far in. Note "la Victoire Couvent de Dominicains" on the south shore of the Zambezi.

Koeman, C&M 7, #97

#15048$500.00
 
 
DE L'ISLE, Guillaume (1675-1726)

In Notitiam Ecclesiaticam Africæ Tabula Geographica

Paris: Apud Auctorem in Ripa vulgo dieta le Quai, 1700 [but 1731]. Engraved with period outline colour. Printed on thick laid paper. In very good condition, mild soiling near the top edge, mostly marginal . Sheet size: 20 x 25 3/4 inches.

An excellent 18th century map of early Christian North Africa by the celebrated French cartographer, Guillaume de L'Isle.

Guillaume de L'Isle (1675-1726) was the son of a cartographer and a pupil of Jean Dominique Cassini, who, among other important contributions, aligned the study of astronomy to the study of geography. Under Cassini's direction, observations were made from locations all over the world that enabled longitudinal calculations to be made with much greater accuracy. De l'Isle carried on this exacting work with remarkable dedication and integrity, constantly revising and improving his maps. While precision was his primary goal, his maps are also invariably elegant and attractive.

This map is from an edition of De L'Isle's Atlas de Geographie, which was re-issued posthumously from 1730 to 1774. This is a map depicting North Africa at the time of the Roman Empire and early Christian church as pieced together by DeL'Isle. It does not pretend to be definitive, but rather a contribution towards knowledge of the era and region.


Moreland and Bannister, Antique Maps p. 132; Tooley's Dictionary of Mapmakers, 395

#18748$400.00
 
 
MOLL, Herman (1654-1732)

To the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of Peterborow, and Monmouth, &c. This Map of Africa

London: H. Moll, T. Bowles, P. Overton , [circa 1720]. Copper-engraved map, with original outline colour, in excellent condition. Repaired center fold. Image size (including text): 22 5/8 x 37 3/4 inches. Sheet size: 25 1/2 x 41 inches.

Herman's Moll's magnificently detailed map of Africa, one of the finest depictions of the continent made in the eighteenth-century

This elegant map of Africa evinces the fact that the continent's coastlines were then very well-known, in great contrast to its heart, referred to as "Ethiopia," a land "wholly unknown to the Europeans." While various European explorers had gone some distance up the Senegal, Niger, Nile and Zambezi rivers, the enigmatic nature of the interior would remain largely intact until the third quarter of the nineteenth-century. As indicated by the detailed toponymy of the west African coast, various European powers maintained an active presence there; a pictorial inset in the lower left of the map depicts "Cape Coast Castle," a major British fortress in modern-day Guinea. The Portuguese controlled trade south of the Congo River on the west coast, and on the eastern coast in the busy trading regions centered on the island of Zanzibar. South Africa was dominated by the Dutch, who founded Cape Town in 1652. A beautiful view of the majestic harbour of the Cape, featuring the unmistakable sight of Table Mountain occupies the lower right of the map. Moll drew on Edmond Halley's revolutionary hydrological chart for his detailed depiction of the ocean currents. This includes the annual periods and direction of the Monsoons in the Indian Ocean that could either greatly assist or completely hinder the progress of sailing vessels.

The present map was part of Herman Moll's magnificent folio work, a New and Compleat Atlas. Moll was the most important cartographer working in London during his era, a career that spanned over fifty years. His origins have been a source of great scholarly debate; however, the prevailing opinion suggests that he hailed from the Hanseatic port city of Bremen, Germany. Joining a number of his countrymen, he fled the turmoil of the Scanian Wars for London, and in 1678 is first recorded as working there as an engraver for Moses Pitt on the production of the English Atlas. It was not long before Moll found himself as a charter member of London's most interesting social circle, which congregated at Jonathan's Coffee House at Number 20 Exchange Alley, Cornhill. It was at this establishment that speculators met to trade equities (most notoriously South Sea Company shares). Moll's coffeehouse circle included the scientist Robert Hooke, the archaeologist William Stuckley, the authors Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and the intellectually-gifted pirates William Dampier, Woodes Rogers and William Hacke. From these friends, Moll gained a great deal of privileged information that was later conveyed in his cartographic works, some appearing in the works of these same figures. Moll was highly astute, both politically and commercially, and he was consistently able to craft maps and atlases that appealed to the particular fancy of wealthy individual patrons, as well as the popular trends of the day. In many cases, his works are amongst the very finest maps of their subjects ever created with toponymy in the English language.

Shirley, Maps in the Atlases of the British Library I, T.Moll-4b, 6; Cf. Reinhartz, The Cartographer and the Literati: Herman Moll and his Intellectual Circle

#21279$3,750.00
 
 
MORTIER, Pierre (1661-1711)

Carte des Costes de L'Afrique ou est compris une Partie de Guinée, Le Royaume de Benin, Isle de St. Thomas &c. Levée Par Ordre Expres des Roys de Portugal, sous quion en a Fiat Decouverte

Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, [1700]. Copper-engraved map, with full original colour and gold embellishments, in very good condition. Sheet size: 24 1/2 x 37 3/4 inches.

A superb coastal chart of western Africa, with exquisite original colour and gold highlights

This large scale, beautifully coloured chart, which shows the west coast of Africa from the southern border of Morocco to the southern border of Gabon, comes from the third part of Mortier's edition of Le Neptune François, or Suite du Neptune François, a lavish collection of charts derived from manuscripts in the Royal Portuguese archives. The Portuguese had of course been the first Europeans to explore the coasts of Africa. The map includes two handsome vignettes of the historically important islands that lie somewhat outside the purview of this chart: Ascension Island and St. Helena.

Pierre Mortier's grandparents were French émigrés, who left France in about 1625 to live in Leiden. His parents settled in Amsterdam in 1661 or 1662. Mortier grew up in Amsterdam but lived in Paris from 1681 to about 1685 where he must have gotten into the book trade. Once he was in Amsterdam again he specialized in French books and maintained his relationships with Parisian publishers. Amsterdam was at this time the international marketplace for books, especially books forbidden by repressive governments.

He established himself in the field of cartographical publishing by offering editions of French maps, primarily Sanson's and Jaillot's to a public tired of the superb but dated Dutch offerings. Working on a scale larger than the typical Dutch folio map and providing the new insights of French geography, he was immensely successful. The charts in his version of Le Neptune François are outstanding examples of cartographical art. They are among the most beautiful printed sea charts ever made.

Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici, M. Mor 7, #5

#14844$1,500.00
 
 
MORTIER, Pierre (1661-1711)

Carte Particuliere des Costes de L'Afrique Qui comprend le Royaume de Maroc &c. Levée Par Ordre Expres des Roys de Portugal sous qui on en a Fait Decouverte.

Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, [1700]. Copper-engraved map, with full original colour and gold embellishments, in excellent condition. Sheet size: 24 1/2 x 37 3/4 inches.

A highly decorative sea chart of the coast of Morocco, with exceptional original colour and highlights in gold

This large scale, beautifully coloured chart, which shows the northwest coast of Africa from Cape Spartel to a point in the Sahara adjacent to the Canary Islands, comes from the third part of Mortier's edition of Le Neptune François, or Suite du Neptune François, a lavish collection of charts derived from manuscripts in the Royal Portuguese archives. The Portuguese had of course been the first Europeans to explore the coasts of Africa. The coast from Gibraltar to the Canaries was well known during the Middle Ages, and had been known to the Romans. This chart is the most accurate and detailed of the African charts in the work, including as it does soundings and notes: historical and advisory. The place-names have changed radically of course.

Pierre Mortier's grandparents were French émigrés, who left France in about 1625 to live in Leiden. His parents settled in Amsterdam in 1661 or 1662. Mortier grew up in Amsterdam but lived in Paris from 1681 to about 1685 where he must have gotten into the book trade. Once he was in Amsterdam again he specialized in French books and maintained his relationships with Parisian publishers. Amsterdam was at this time the international marketplace for books, especially books forbidden by repressive governments.

He established himself in the field of cartographical publishing by offering editions of French maps, primarily Sanson's and Jaillot's to a public tired of the superb but dated Dutch offerings. Working on a scale larger than the typical Dutch folio map and providing the new insights of French geography, he was immensely successful. The charts in his version of Le Neptune François are outstanding examples of cartographical art. They are among the most beautiful printed sea charts ever made.

Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici, Mor 7, # 9

#14842$1,850.00
 
 
MÜNSTER, Sebastian (1488-1552)

Africa XVIII, Nova Tabula

[Basel: Heinrich Petri in the 'Geographia Universalis', 1542]. Woodcut map, in excellent condition. Sheet size: 11 3/4 x 15 1/8 inches.

The first state of the earliest reasonably obtainable map to focus on the depiction of the entire continent of Africa, and a veritable masterpiece of Renaissance cartography

This highly important map represents the earliest reasonably obtainable map to depict the entire continent of Africa. Africa XVIII, Nova Tabula, is a fantastic visual synergy of archaic imagination and recent exploration. The overall shape of the continent is quite well defined, having been extensively explored by the Portuguese since the time of Prince Henry the Navigator in the mid-fifteenth-century, a point highlighted by the appearance of a caravel in the lower part of the map. Africa's various kingdoms are denoted by pictorial symbols of a crown and sceptre. Following Ptolemaic tradition, the Nile has its source in a series of lakes that lie at the foot of the mysterious Mountains of the Moon. The land around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa is embellished by the appearance of an elephant, and exotic parrots occupy trees in Angola. Most amusingly, near the coast of east Africa, the "Monoculi," or one-eyed man imagined by Classical writers sits in wait for some hypothetical European visitor.

Münster was a brilliant polymath and one of the most important intellectuals of the Renaissance era. Educated at Tübingen, his surviving college notebooks, Kollegienbuch, reveal a mind of insatiable curiosity, especially with regards to cosmography. Münster later became a professor of Hebrew at Heidelberg, and then from 1529 at the University of Basle. In the 1530s, he turned his attentions to translating Ptolemy's Geography, adding new material that related to the lands newly discovered in Africa, the Americas and Asia. The result was the publication of his highly regarded Geographia Universalis, first printed in 1540. The present map is from the second edition, but still represents the first-state of the map, as the same unaltered woodblock from the initial printing was employed in the production of the second edition. Münster was also a trend-setter in his ideas regarding design and layout of maps, and he was one of the first to create space on his woodblocks for the insertion of place names in metal type. Münster later published his Cosmographia (1544, revised 1550), a monumental encyclopedic book of contemporary knowledge and legend that became one of the most widely read books in Europe.

Norwich, Maps of Africa, 2; Tooley, The Printed Maps of the Whole of the Continent of Africa, Part 1 (1500-1600), 6

#20041$4,500.00
 
 
[NOLIN, Jean-Baptiste (1657-1725)] and Jean-Baptiste NOLIN II (1686-1762)

L'Afrique Dressée Sur les Relationes les Plus Recentes et rectifiées sur les dernieres observations

Paris: Chez l'auteur rue s.Jacques au dessous de la rue Mathurins a l'Enseigne de la Place des Victoires, 1740. Copper-engraved wall map, with original outline colour, of four joined sheets, surrounded by text and vignettes printed on separate sheets, backed onto old linen, with contemporary wooden rollers, overall in very good condition. Sheet size: 49 x 55 inches.

A rare and monumental wall map of Africa by a great French master of cartography.

Jean-Baptiste Nolin was one of the most accomplished and certainly the most ambitious French cartographer of his era. He founded what ultimately became a family empire in Paris in the 1680s. Exceptionally, he managed to marry superlative decorative ornamentation with the serious objective of producing maps that reflected the most advanced rendering of geographical detail. The artistic élan of his compositions evinced a style that preserved the rhetorical ambitions of the Baroque ethic, while anticipating the playful elegance of the Rococo period. His masterpieces, many like the present wall map, were monumental in scale and represented Nolin's desire to overwhelm his competition in what was a very challenging market. Highly controversial, Nolin occasionally described himself as "the Engraver to the King", an appointment of which the royal court was curiously never apprised. In his endeavour to include the very latest geographical details on his maps, he seldom hesitated to acquire information from his eminent contemporaries, most notably Guillaume De L'Isle and Vincenzo Maria Coronelli, Jean-Dominique Cassini and the Sieur de Tillemon. At times these rivals were not appreciative of Nolin's adoption of their intellectual property, as De L'Isle successfully sued Nolin for plagiarism in 1705. However, the larger-than-life Nolin always seemed to transcend these challenges, leaving a thriving enterprise to be taken up by his son.

The present map was created in 1740 by Jean-Baptiste Nolin II, largely based on earlier maps produced by his father. Geographically, the map is relatively progressive, however it showcases some rather curious speculations. The coastlines are well defined, having been explored for over two-hundred and fifty years, however, the heart of Africa remains an enigma. In the absence of direct observation, the European imagination was given free reign. In this light, Nolin adopts the seventeenth-century conceptions popularized by De L'Isle and Coronelli that the Nile was somehow connected to the Niger River, even though both rivers flow in different directions to terminate at points thousands of miles apart. Furthermore, the written descriptions of the continent's inhabitants are replete with archaic legends of bizarre and monstrous races.

The presented map is an artistically virtuous composition on a monumental scale, the image being surrounded by thirty vignettes that depict events from African history. The focus of the vignettes is on the better known North African regions, however, there is also a great deal of attention paid to French commercial activities in Guinea. Each vignette is set within an elaborate baroque frame of a unique design, and is accompanied by textual narratives. The detailed description at the bottom is entitled "Description Geographique de L'Afrique." The large title cartouche is framed by period rocaille swirls, and is inhabited by an optimistic scene depicting the amicable commerce between Africans and Europeans, as well as a dedication to Louis XV.

This wall map is one of the greatest subjects of the Nolins' legacy, not only being a masterful work of art and a fascinating image that tests the very limits of European geographical knowledge, but also a vivid record of a dramatic transitional period in the history of cartography, and of society in general.

Tooley, Maps of Africa, p.86, plate 67.

#15517$25,000.00
 
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