Cartography · a Light

Europe read his geography for centuries under a wrong name

Al-Idrisi finished his geography for Roger II of Sicily in January 1154. Its structure is a grid: the inhabited world divided into seven bands of climate, each band cut into ten sections, giving seventy sectional maps that fit together into one map of the world, with a chapter of description for each. Fewer than a dozen manuscripts survive. In 1592 an abridged Arabic version was printed at Rome, among the first Arabic books printed in Europe with movable type. A Latin translation followed in 1619, and its editors, not knowing who had written it, called it the Geographia Nubiensis. For most of two centuries European scholars cited an anonymous geographer from Nubia who had never existed.

Al-Idrisi · Palermo 1154, printed Rome 1592