28 results
Jerusalem Delivered
La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem delivered) is a verse epic by the late-Renaissance Italian poet Torquato Tasso (1544–95). Written in the eight-line stanzas common to Italian Renaissance poetry, Tasso’s masterpiece is known for the beauty of its language, profound expressions of emotion, and concern for historical accuracy. The subject of the poem is the First Crusade of 1096–99 and the quest by the Frankish knight Godfrey of Bouillon to liberate the sepulcher of Jesus Christ. Tasso was born in Sorrento, in the Kingdom of Naples, and his interest ...
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University Library of Naples
The Near East
This 1952 map by the Army Map Service of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers provides a broad overview of the Near East, the geographic region traditionally thought of as encompassing the countries of southwest Asia, including Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, and Jordan, and the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. In addition to political borders, the map shows lakes, rivers, and other bodies of water, marshlands, cities by population, pipelines, railroads, and pumping stations. Above the key is a glossary of topographic terms with transliterations and translations into ...
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Library of Congress
Map of Northern Arabia: in Illustration of Lady Anne Blunt’s Journeys
This map shows the routes of two Arabian journeys taken in the late 1870s by Lady Anne Blunt (1837–1917) and her husband, the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922). Lady Anne was a skilled equestrienne and horse breeder, who purchased Arabian horses from Bedouin tribesmen, which she then had transported back to England. Her work did much to establish the Arabian breed in Britain. In 1878, Lady Anne journeyed from Beirut, across northern Syria, and south through Mesopotamia to Baghdad. From there she traveled north along the Tigris River ...
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Library of Congress
Map of Persia, Turkey in Asia: Afghanistan, Beloochistan
Samuel Augustus Mitchell (1792–1868) was a renowned American geographer and cartographer. The majority of his work focused on the United States, but he also made maps of other parts of the world, including this 1868 map of the Ottoman Empire, Persia (present-day Iran), Afghanistan, and Baluchistan. The main territorial units that Mitchell shows are Turkey, meaning the core of the Ottoman Empire comprised of present-day Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon; Persia; Afghanistan; and Baluchistan (mainly present-day Pakistan). Egypt and much of the Arabian Peninsula were at that time technically ...
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Library of Congress
The Eastern Question in Europe and Asia
In the late-19th century, European politics were troubled by what had come to be called the “Eastern Question,” the fate of the 600-year Ottoman Empire. Once encompassing the Ottoman heartland of Anatolia (present-day Turkey), most of the Arab Middle East, and the Balkan Peninsula, by 1886 the empire had shrunk dramatically as a result of wars with European powers, Russia in particular, and revolts by subject peoples. This 1886 map, published in London, shows the Turkish Empire as comprised mainly of Albania, Thrace, Crete, Anatolia, and parts of the Arab ...
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Library of Congress
War Map of Egypt, Palestine, and Arabia
This German-language military map, published some time in the late-19th century, depicts Egypt, Palestine, and the Arabian Peninsula. It also includes parts of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (present-day Sudan), Ethiopia, and Eritrea. Railroads, caravan routes, telegraph lines, pyramids, fortifications, and ruins are indicated by symbols shown in the key at the lower left. The German equivalents of some Arabic topographic terms are given. An inset map in the upper right shows the Nile Delta and the Sinai Peninsula. Relief is shown by shading, and the heights of important mountains and passes are ...
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Library of Congress
Persia, Arabia, Tartary, Afghanistan
This map by Thomas Gamaliel Bradford (1802–87), depicting parts of the Middle East and Central Asia, appeared in Bradford’s A Comprehensive Atlas: Geographical, Historical & Commercial, which was published in Boston in 1835. Bradford was born in Boston of a distinguished New England family. He made maps of both U.S. states and foreign countries and became the assistant editor of the Encyclopedia Americana, the first significant encyclopedia produced in the United States. The map uses colored lines to delineate the boundaries of the Persian Empire, Afghanistan, Arabia, and ...
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Library of Congress
The Euphrates Valley: Syria, Kurdistan, et cetera
This early 20th-century British map depicts the Euphrates Valley, a region that includes parts of present-day Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. Also shown is the northern part of the Arabian Peninsula. The map indicates railroads, both existing and projected, and the route of submarine telegraph cables. The vilayets (administrative provinces) of the Ottoman Empire in Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine and southern Anatolia are marked by red lines. A dotted line running across Persia (present-day Iran) from west to east is labeled “Southern limit of Russian sphere.” Under the Anglo-Russian Convention of ...
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Library of Congress
Palestine, Tribes, and Jerusalem
Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville (1697-1782) was one of the most important French geographers of the 18th century. He worked during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. D’Anville’s approach to geography was geometric; he believed that man’s presence was worthy of acknowledgement only insofar as it helped the cartographer to establish the boundaries of a place. He focused on fidelity to what was documented about the territory in question using knowledge gleaned from travel journals, historical accounts, old maps, poems, and more. D’Anville was ...
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Library of Congress
Map of the River Jordan and Dead Sea: And the Route of the Party Under the Command of Lieutenant W.F. Lynch, United States Navy
In 1847-48, Lt. William Francis Lynch of the U.S. Navy led a 16-man expedition to explore the Dead Sea and the course of the River Jordan to its source, with the assent of the Secretary of the Navy John Y. Mason and the support of the United States Naval Hydrographic Office. The United States had no formal designs on territory in the Middle East, but personally Lynch found the Holy Land ripe for colonization and commerce. Upon his return, he published accounts of the expedition and lectured on the ...
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Library of Congress
The Holy Land or Promised Land (Formerly Palestine), Recently Depicted and Published
Nicolaus (also spelled Nicolas, Nicolaes) Visscher was the son of a Dutch master painter and mapmaker, Claes Janszoon Visscher, and was known for the exquisite artistry of the maps he produced. In the 16th and 17th centuries the Dutch were involved in a race against Portugal for control of the spice trade. The antipathy between the two states ran especially deep because of the alliance of Portugal with the Kingdom of Spain, with whom the Dutch had been embroiled in the Eighty Years' War (1566-1648). Only one year before the ...
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Library of Congress
Division of the Land of Israel Within its Borders: Copied from the Great Luminary, the Famous and Pious Gaon, Our Teacher and Rabbi, Rabbi Eliyahu from Vilna, the Capital
This drawing of the division of the Land of Israel among the 12 tribes is a copy of a work by Rabbi Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman (1720-97), better known as the Vilna Gaon or Elijah of Vilna (Vilnius, in present-day Lithuania). Elijah of Vilna was one of the most influential non-Hasidic Jewish thinkers since the Middle Ages. In addition to being an authority on the Torah and the Talmud, he was recognized as an accomplished mathematician and astronomer. A prolific writer, Elijah of Vilna produced commentary on nearly every known ...
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National Library of Israel
Sixth Map of Asia
Several editions of Ptolemy’s Geographia (Geography), translated into Latin from the original Greek, were published in Europe in the 15th century. This map is from the 1478 edition, which was published in Rome. Ptolemaic atlases included 12 maps of Asia. The “Sixth Map of Asia” covered the Arabian Peninsula. The outlines of this map are crude, but many geographic features, including the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and different features of the peninsula are clearly recognizable.
Contributed by
Qatar National Library
Second Map of Sacred Geography Gathered from the Old and New Testaments: This Map Shows the Promised Land Divided into Its Tribes and Regions
This hand-colored map of the Holy Land is a reprint of a map that appeared in the 1662 edition of Nicolas Sanson’s Geographia sacra (Sacred geography), first published in 1653. Sanson (1600-67) is considered by many to be the founder of the French school of cartography. The map was published in Amsterdam in 1704 by François Halma (1653-1722), a Dutch bookseller and publisher who started a business in Utrecht, later moved to Amsterdam, and finally settled in Leeuwarden.
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National Library of Israel
Judaea, or the Holy Land, Which is Divided into the Twelve Tribes of the Hebrews or Israelites
This map of the Holy Land by Guillaume Sanson (1633-1703) and Alexis Hubert Jaillot (1632?-1712) is an enlargement of a previous map by Sanson’s father, Nicolas Sanson (1600-67). The map shows the division of Biblical Israel among the Twelve Tribes and is based on information found in the Bible. The younger Sanson took over the family publishing business after his father’s death and had a long-standing relationship with Jaillot, who re-engraved many of Nicolas Sanson’s maps.
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National Library of Israel
This [is being produced] so that all can know the route of the travels [of the Israelites] 40 years in the desert [through] the width and length of the Holy Land from the Nile to the city of Damascus, from the Arnon Valley to the Mediterranean Sea, and in it each individual tribe was given its own portion of the land
This 1695 copperplate engraving of the Holy Land is one of the earliest printed maps in Hebrew. The map was drawn by Abraham Ben-Jacob, a convert to Judaism, based on an earlier map by Christiaan van Adrichem (1533-85), and reproduced in the Amsterdam Haggadah. The map features Biblical illustrations, among them depictions of the story of Jonah and the whale, King Solomon’s fleet carrying the cedar trees for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem, and beehives and cows symbolizing the milk and honey of the Promised Land. The ...
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National Library of Israel
A Geographical Rendering of Judaea, or the Land of Israel, in Which the Positions of the Most Famous Places in the Old and New Testament are Precisely Depicted
This hand-colored copperplate map of the Holy Land, featuring notable cities from the Bible, appeared in Le theatre du monde ou nouvel atlas (Theater of the world, or new atlas), a work by Jan Jansson (1588-1664) that was published in Amsterdam circa 1658. It depicts the kingdoms of Judea and Israel, along with territory stretching north to present-day Beirut and land on both sides of the Jordan River as far south as the Dead Sea. It also includes a key to major cities, priestly towns, and towns belonging to the ...
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National Library of Israel
The Situation of the Promised Land Accurately Reveals a Knowledge of the Holy Bible
This copperplate engraving of the Holy Land is the first in a series of reprints of a map by Christiaan van Adrichem (1533-85) by Dutch publishers in the 17th century. Adrichem was a Roman Catholic priest and biblical scholar, and the map depicts the Holy Land as Adrichem conceived it, based on his study of the scriptures. The map was printed in Amsterdam in 1633 by Henricus Hondius (1597-1651), and was included in a new edition of the Atlas ou representation du monde universel (Atlas, or universal representation of the ...
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National Library of Israel
Journey and Life of the Patriarch Abraham
This map tracing the life of the patriarch Abraham was published in Antwerp in 1590 by Abraham Ortelius (1527-98), the Flemish publisher who created the world’s first atlas. It is the first printing of a map by Tilemann Stella (circa 1525-89), a German cartographer, geographer, and mathematician. The inset map at the upper left shows Abraham’s journey to the Holy Land from the land of his birth, identified in the Bible as Ur of the Chaldees. The main map shows places in the Holy Land identified with Abraham ...
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National Library of Israel
Description of the Holy Land
This woodcut map of 1585 shows the Holy Land as it would have appeared at the time of Jesus, divided into Galilee, Samaria, and Judea. The map appeared in the Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae (Travel book through Holy Scripture) of Heinrich Bünting (1545-1606). Bünting studied theology at the University of Wittenberg in Germany and became a Protestant pastor and theologian, but retired from the ministry after controversy arose over some of his teachings. Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae was an immensely popular book in its day. It provided the most complete available summary ...
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National Library of Israel
Present-Day Palestine and the Holy Land
This map of Palestine and the Holy Land was published in Florence around 1480 and was included in Francesco Berlinghieri’s expanded edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia (Geography). Berlinghieri, an Italian scholar and diplomat, was the first modern European to interpret, expand upon, and republish the works of the second-century Greek astronomer and geographer. Nicolo Tedesco, a German printer who worked in Florence, printed Berlinghieri’s work as well as engraved the maps. As with all the modern maps of Palestine added to the early printed editions of Ptolemy, this ...
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National Library of Israel