Oldest map to use word ‘America’ up for sale

Christie’s house aforementioned Tuesday it’s discovered a old and previously unknown copy of a 510-year-old maps dubbed “America’s birth certificate” because it gave the New World its name.

Julian Wilson, a senior specialist in Christie’s books department, aforementioned the two-dimensional globe created in 1507 by pioneering German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller is “the earliest piece of writing that uses the word America.”

Waldseemueller decided to call the land when Italian adventurer Vespucci, who helped show that lands being explored by Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries weren’t — as Columbus initially surmised — part of Asia.

A wall-map version of the same chart by Waldseemueller, purchased by the Library of Congress for $10 million in 2003, has been known as “America’s birth certificate,” and Wilson aforesaid the name equally applies to this version.

This is the 1st time that America is on the map, in additional ways that than one.

Christie’s plans to offer the map for sale in London Dec. 13, and set the value it’s estimated to fetch at between 600,000 pounds ($788,000) and 900,000 pounds ($1.2 million). Four different copies of the map exist in museums and private collections, but this one was previously unknown.

The map is the oldest-known printed globe, designed to be cut out and pasted around a wood ball. it’s additionally the first map to indicate North and South America as separate continents and to depict the distinct Pacific Ocean, that no European had then seen.

Wilson aforementioned the map is remarkably correct. Waldseemueller was one among a group of cartographers based in Saint-Die, France that charted discoveries made by Spanish and Portuguese explorers and had access to the latest and most elaborated data.

This map has some quirks including a very large Sri Lanka and a very tiny India. In this map, Japan is placed in the mid-Pacific and Australia is missing. [read more..]

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