authentic sicilian map

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Negovan

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Hi everyone. Sorry for a bit off-topic question,  but I’m very interested in that authentic arabic map, we see when loading game. Couldn’t find it on net. Got someone any information of it or links to share? Or at least pics of map without modern signs such as Balarm, etc.. ?
thanks!
 
Oops -- I probably ought to have put the map in the credits. If I recall correctly, it came from the collection of Mohammed al-Idrisi (alt Idrissi), a 12th century geographer in the court of Sicily's King Roger. There are actually a couple of full websites devoted to it. Unfortunately I can't find the one from which I took the detail of Sicily, but one version which is zoomable is here -- http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/map_item.pl. It has the names translated into English. I should probably try to find the original source of the image I used. Glad to see it caught your interest!

 
this map is really interesting especially if it's from al-Idrisi collection! On it, as we see Sicily is shown in form of sphere, and if look on his so cold The Tabula Rogeriana, world map, Sicily is shown very accurate, close to it's real geographical form. Maps organized in circles belong to earlier tradition and we can suppose that in 12 century different maps were used in different aims. Knowledge of that time was high enough to produce maps with correct forms of objects and distances between them, but ancient "sphere" maps were still widely used for practical purposes - to get from one place to another (as we see, using that map it was probably possible to get from Balarm for example, to Syracuse).  This can bring us to middle ages mentality and domination of practisism over accuracy :smile:
It’s all my primitive supposes, as I moan for not having access to western historiography dedicated to medieval  cartography, and possibility to study this question close.
Unfortunately the link you gave isn’t working (maybe it's mine problem, but I tried it from dieferent browsers with no success) :sad: If you’ll recall the source of pic. pls don’t forget this topic :smile: Maybe you still have it saved on your pc? I would be very grateful for sharing! I’ve got flaming desire to read those arabic signs to map objects :smile:
  Anyway thanks for response and billion thanks for your attention to history in the mod.
 
Actually I just looked at the map again for the first time in a while, and I realized that it is probably not the Idrisi one. The look is certainly different from the Idrisi collection -- a lot more stylized -- and I vaguely recall that it might be a 14th century copy of an 11th century original. I should probably dig around my notes at some point to see if I can find the source again. Sorry about that!
 
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