Category — rare maps

This comes to maptheuniverse via Courtney (with apologies to her for the delay in this posting!)

New York Public Library recently posted a short online video entitled “Mapping the World” that provides a behind-the-scenes snapshot of its map collection. The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division is the largest public library map collection in the world.

The library’s Alice C. Hudson walks through some beautiful examples of antique maps in the collection, and Matthew Knutzen highlights a library project that scans antique maps and georeferences them to present-day map layers, providing “snapshots” of an area over time in a geographic information system.

Thank you, Courtney!

[tags]map collections, new york public library, antique maps, GIS[/tags]

Over 1,100 maps of Israel from the Jewish National and University Library’s collection dating as far back as 1462 have been put online in English and in Hebrew. The collection is entitled, “Holy Land Maps” and consists of maps from the Eran Laor Cartographic Collection.

Many maps of the Holy Land are oriented to the east (orient=from the Latin word for east), reflecting the view point of European mapmakers looking in the direction of the Holy Land. However, there are a few maps oriented to the south, and to the west and naturally to the north. Many Biblical elements from the Old and New Testament can be traced in the maps, such as the route of the Exodus, the Tabernacle, the division of the Land among the Tribes, Moses and Aaron, the travels of Jesus and the Apostles, and others. Toward the end of the 18th century a new genre of maps emerged, characterized by the diminished use of pictorial elements. These were replaced by symbols such as letters and numbers, for example to mark the Tribes. The legends appear in the margins.

[tags]Antique Maps, Maps of Isreal, Online Map Collections[/tags]

The Hartford Courant reports today that a rare 1524 woodcut map printed on linen rag paper, has been returned to Yale. Yale owns one of the last surviving copies of Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés’ map of the ancient Aztec island city of Tenochtitlan, worth an estimated $150,000. The map has been missing in action for the last two years. Yale posted a picture online, and last month, a map dealer who had purchased the map from map thief E. Forbes Smiley III came forward and returned it. The map depicts aqueducts, dikes made of reeds, palaces and a royal aviary. At the center is the Great Temple, where human beings were sacrificed to the gods.

[tags]antique maps, E. Forbes Smiley III, Cortes, famous cartographers, Aztecs[/tags]