It is engraved with then-new and vague details about the Americas garnered from European explorers like Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. It is also decorated with monsters, intertwining waves and even a shipwrecked sailor, according to the Washington Map Society, which published a study of the artifact in its journal The Portolan.I love that they made it out of ostrich eggs.
August 25, 2013
The oldest globe that includes the Americas.
"Dated to the early 1500s, the globe was likely crafted in Florence, Italy, from the lower halves of two ostrich eggs."
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6 comments:
I love that they made it out of ostrich eggs.
They're a renewable resource.
"I love that they made it out of ostrich eggs."
Presumably the ostrich parents feel differently about that.
How would you like to spend the best years of your life engraving ostrich eggs. One oopsie and you start from scratch again. I don't envy ostrich egg engravers. It's a very demanding profession. No wonder it's a lost art.
Ironic that a map is made from the egg of a flightless bird. Men with maps (or maps in their heads) have caused the extinction of hundreds of species over recent centuries. It's not so much the human hunters as the vermin (cats, rats, serpents etc) that we bring along that have killed them. Eggs are delicious and nutritious.
Another very old Islamic map of the Americas had text written in it which described the discovery of America as follows:
"These coasts are named the shores of Antilia. They were discovered in the year 896 of the Arab calendar. It is reported thus, that a Genoese infidel, his name was Colombo, discovered these places. A book fell into the hands of the said Colombo, and he found it said in this book that at the end of the Western Sea [Atlantic] that is, on its western side, there were coasts and islands and all kinds of metals and also precious stones. Colombo, having studied this book thoroughly, explained these matters one by one to the greats of Genoa and said: "Come, give me two ships, let me go and find these places." They said: "O unprofitable man, can an end or a limit be found to the Western Sea ? Even its vapour is full of darkness." The above-mentioned Colombo saw that no help was forthcoming from the Genoese, he sped forth, went to the Bey of Spain [king]...
This is from the Piri Reis map, one of my all time favorite maps. If you liked the ostrich egg, you will love Piri Reis
http://turkeyinmaps.com/piri.html#V.
It's amazing that in that early era, new scientific information could be spread so quickly. Columbus "discovered" the new world (which he thought was Asia) in his 1492 voyage. If this globe was made in 1504, it means that within a dozen years the existence of a land mass or masses west of Europe and Africa and east of Asia had been incorporated into scientific understanding.
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