Indigenous maps

Whereas most known early maps of

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surfac ...

were prepared in the framework of the colonial enterprise, some indigenous maps have been recently uncovered, particularly in West Africa and Ethiopia.

Earliest European maps

The earliest cartographic depictions of Africa are found in

early world maps The earliest known world maps date to classical antiquity, the oldest examples of the 6th to 5th centuries Common Era, BCE still based on the flat Earth paradigm. World maps assuming a spherical Earth first appear in the Hellenistic period. The ...

. In

classical antiquity Classical antiquity, also known as the classical era, classical period, classical age, or simply antiquity, is the period of cultural History of Europe, European history between the 8th century BC and the 5th century AD comprising the inter ...

, ''

'' (also ''

Libya Libya, officially the State of Libya, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to Egypt–Libya border, the east, Sudan to Libya–Sudan border, the southeast, Chad to Chad–L ...

'') was assumed to cover the quarter of the globe south of the

Mediterranean The Mediterranean Sea ( ) is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern ...

, an arrangement that was adhered to in medieval

T and O map A T and O map or O–T or T–O map (''orbis terrarum'', orb or circle of the lands; with the letter T inside an O), also known as an Isidoran map, is a type of early world map that represents the Afro-Eurasian landmass as a circle (= O) divid ...

s. The only part of Africa well known in antiquity was the coast of North Africa, described in Greek

periplus A periplus (), or periplous, is a manuscript document that lists the ports and coastal landmarks, in order and with approximate intervening distances, that the captain of a vessel could expect to find along a shore. In that sense, the periplus wa ...

from the 6th century BC.

Hellenistic era In classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Greek history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC, which was followed by the ascendancy of the Roma ...

geographers A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society, including how society and nature interacts. The Greek prefix "geo" means "earth" ...

defined

Ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt () was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower E ...

as part of ''Asia'', taking the boundary of Asia and Egypt to lie at the '' Catabathmus Magnus'' (the escarpment of ''Akabah el-Kebir'' in western Egypt).

Ptolemy's world map The Ptolemy world map is a map of the world known to Greco-Roman societies in the 2nd century. It is based on the description contained in Ptolemy's book ''Geography'', written . Based on an inscription in several of the earliest surviving manusc ...

(2nd century) shows a reasonable awareness of the general topography of

North Africa North Africa (sometimes Northern Africa) is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region. However, it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of t ...

, but is unaware of anything south of the

equator The equator is the circle of latitude that divides Earth into the Northern Hemisphere, Northern and Southern Hemisphere, Southern Hemispheres of Earth, hemispheres. It is an imaginary line located at 0 degrees latitude, about in circumferen ...

. The limit of Ptolemy's knowledge in the west is

Cape Spartel Cape Spartel (; ; ) is a promontory in Morocco about above sea level at the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, 12 km west of Tangier. It is the northwesternmost point of the African continent. Below the cape are the Caves of Hercules. Des ...

(35° 48′ N); while he does assume that the coast eventually retreats in a "Great Gulf of the Western Ocean", this is not likely based on any knowledge of the

Gulf of Guinea The Gulf of Guinea (French language, French: ''Golfe de Guinée''; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Golfo de Guinea''; Portuguese language, Portuguese: ''Golfo da Guiné'') is the northeasternmost part of the tropical Atlantic Ocean from Cape Lopez i ...

.Eric Anderson Walker, ''The Cambridge history of the British Empire'', Volume 7, Part 1, 1963
p. 66
/ref> In the east, Ptolemy is aware of the

Red Sea The Red Sea is a sea inlet of the Indian Ocean, lying between Africa and Asia. Its connection to the ocean is in the south, through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden. To its north lie the Sinai Peninsula, the Gulf of Aqaba, and th ...

(''Sinus Arabicus'') and the protrusion of the

Horn of Africa The Horn of Africa (HoA), also known as the Somali Peninsula, is a large peninsula and geopolitical region in East Africa.Robert Stock, ''Africa South of the Sahara, Second Edition: A Geographical Interpretation'', (The Guilford Press; 2004), ...

, describing the gulf south of the Horn of Africa as ''Sinus Barbaricus''.

Modern maps

With the

European exploration of Africa The geography of North Africa has been reasonably well known among Europeans since classical antiquity in Greco-Roman geography. Northwest Africa (the Maghreb) was known as either ''Libya'' or ''Africa'', while Egypt was considered part of Asia. ...

from the 15th century, maps of Africa became more precise. The

Fra Mauro map The Fra Mauro map is a World map, map of the world made around 1450 by the Italian (Republic of Venice, Venetian) cartographer Fra Mauro, which is “considered the greatest memorial of medieval cartography." It is a circular planisphere drawn on ...

of 1459 shows a more detailed picture of Africa as a continent, including the ''Cape of Diab'' at its southernmost point, reflecting an expedition of 1420.

Sebastian Münster Sebastian Münster (20 January 1488 – 26 May 1552) was a German cartographer and cosmographer. He also was a Christian Hebraist scholar who taught as a professor at the University of Basel. His well-known work, the highly accurate world map, ...

's '' Cosmographia'' (1545) labels the

Cape of Good Hope The Cape of Good Hope ( ) is a rocky headland on the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa. A List of common misconceptions#Geography, common misconception is that the Cape of Good Hope is the southern tip of Afri ...

, reached by

Bartolomeu Dias Bartolomeu Dias ( – 29 May 1500) was a Portuguese mariner and explorer. In 1488, he became the first European navigator to round the Cape Agulhas, southern tip of Africa and to demonstrate that the most effective southward route for ships lies ...

in 1488, as ''caput bonae spei''. The interior of Africa was not mapped in any detail before the second half of the 19th century.

References

Sources

* *

Indigenous maps

Earliest European maps

Modern maps

References

Sources

Further reading

See also