A good example of the third engraved map of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), the Levant and the Holy Land, from Berlinghieri's celebrated atlas.
Francesco di Niccolo Berlinghieri completed the Septe Giornate della Geografia in about 1479, as a paraphrase of Ptolemy's geographical text in Italian verse, in which he combined classical and contemporary texts; he illustrated the text with thirty-one maps, twenty-seven based on Ptolemy, with four modern maps. The volume was printed in 1482, and is regarded as the third printed atlas of the world, after the 1477 Bologna and 1478 Rome editions. Maps from the 1477 atlas are so rare as to be unobtainable, leaving this as the second oldest engraved map of Mesopotamia, the Levant and the Holy Land acquirable by a collector.
The map is drawn on Marinus' plane projection, and is therefore the only one of the early Ptolemaic maps to be drawn on his original projection, with equidistant meridians and parallels. It covers the modern-day countries of Cyprus, Jordan, Palestine, Syria and most of Iraq.
This example appears to be from the first or second issue of the atlas, printed in 1482. Complete atlases of any issue are scarce and individual maps are decidedly rare: “It is also said that these maps were sometimes sold separately, or in sets without text. I’ve hardly ever come across single examples and only once a set” (Wardington Catalogue).
Campbell, Earliest Printed Maps, 169.
