Tabula VIII Asiae: Scythia extra Imaum Montem and Serica (Central Asia and the land of silk), Lyon 1535

Key Properties

Edition: Ptolemy of Lorenz Fries, third edition, Lyon, Melchior and Gaspar Trechsel, 1535, edited by Michael Servetus (Villanovanus); the blocks first used at Strasbourg in 1522 and 1525

Language: Latin

Format: Woodcut on laid paper, double-page, with the customary central fold

Dimensions: Sheet 42 x 55.5 cm (height x width)

Colouring: Uncoloured, as issued

Collation & Technical Description

A double-page woodcut map within a graduated trapezoidal border, the Ptolemaic projection with the degrees of longitude along the top and bottom and of latitude at the sides, the climates and the lengths of the longest day noted in the margins. It shows Scythia extra Imaum Montem, the lands beyond the Imaus mountains, and Serica, the land of silk, with the mountain ranges rendered as chains of hummocks, the rivers, regions and peoples named in the classical manner, from the Asmiraea and Casii mountains to the Serica Regio and the Sinae. On the verso, on the left, the descriptive text to Tabula VIII Asiae (Gaudent Scytharum gentes caede humana...) and, on the right, the heading Tabula VIII Asiae, Hae sunt e cognitis totius orbis, with the table of the regions, mountains and rivers of the map (Area tabulae), all set within the elaborate Renaissance woodcut borders of columns, candelabra, figures and grotesques, with large decorated initials and urn vignettes.

Condition

A good, even impression. The usual central fold from its insertion in the atlas; some age-toning and light staining, mostly in the margins.

References & Bibliography

Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and their Maps, 28/57 (Fries). Shirley, Maps in the Atlases of the British Library, on the Fries editions. Nordenskiöld, Facsimile-Atlas to the Early History of Cartography, on the Ptolemy editions.

Description

The eighth map of Asia in Ptolemy's Geographia covers the north-eastern extremity of the world known to antiquity: Scythia beyond the Imaus, the great mountain barrier that Ptolemy placed across the heart of Asia, and Serica, the land of the silk-producing Seres, the ancient West's name for the interior of China as reached by the overland caravan routes. It is the map of the Silk Road as the second century imagined it, the eastern edge of the Ptolemaic world.

The present version is the reduced woodcut prepared by Lorenz Fries for the Ptolemy first published at Strasbourg by Johann Grüninger in 1522. Fries, a physician and follower of Waldseemüller, redrew the maps of the great Strasbourg Ptolemy of 1513 on a smaller scale for a more affordable book. After a second Strasbourg edition in 1525 the blocks passed to the Trechsel brothers at Lyon, who published them in 1535 in an edition revised by the young Michael Servetus, the physician and theologian later burned at Geneva; a final edition followed at Vienne in 1541. The present sheet is from the Lyon edition of 1535, and on the verso the descriptive text is now accompanied by Servetus's table of the regions, mountains and rivers shown on the map.

What makes the Fries sheets particularly attractive is that verso: the Latin text is set within elaborate Renaissance woodcut borders of columns, candelabra, figures and grotesques, so that the leaf is as fine a piece of sixteenth-century book design as it is a map.

We also hold an example of the same map from the first edition of 1522 (FM-0182); the two sheets show the changes in the text and its setting between the Strasbourg and the Lyon editions.

Historical Significance

The Ptolemaic maps of Asia were the framework within which Europe understood the East on the eve of the great discoveries: it was this Serica, and the Sinae to its south, that Columbus expected to reach by sailing west. The Lyon edition of 1535 is remembered for its editor, Michael Servetus, whose notes to the maps were later cited against him at his trial for heresy.

Provenance

Available on request.