Portal:Atlas
The Atlas Portal An atlas is a collection of maps, traditionally bound into book form, but now found in multimedia formats. As well as geographic features and political boundaries, many often feature geopolitical, social, religious and economic statistics. The first book that could be called an atlas was constructed from the calculations of Claudius Ptolemy, a Greek geographer working in Alexandria circa A.D. 150. The first edition was published in Bologna in 1477 and was illustrated with a set of 27 maps, though scholars say that it is not known whether the printed maps were engraved versions of original maps made by Ptolemy, or whether they were constructed by medieval Greek scholars from Ptolemy's text.  The origin of the term atlas is a common source of misconception, perhaps because two different mythical figures named 'Atlas' are associated with mapmaking. King Atlas, a mythical King of Mauretania, was, according to legend, a wise philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who supposedly made the first celestial globe. However, the more widely known Atlas is a figure from Greek mythology. More about Atlases...
Featured map Selected article The Geographia is Ptolemy's main work besides the Almagest. It is a compilation of what was known about the world's geography in the Roman Empire of the 2nd century. Ptolemy relied mainly on the work of an earlier geographer, Marinos of Tyre, and on gazetteers of the Roman and ancient Persian empire, but most of his sources beyond the perimeter of the Empire were unreliable. Ptolemy also devised and provided instructions on how to create maps both of the whole inhabited world (oikoumenè) and of the Roman provinces. In the second part of the Geographia he provided the necessary topographic lists, and captions for the maps. His oikoumenè spanned 180 degrees of longitude from the Canary islands in the Atlantic Ocean to China, and about 80 degrees of latitude from the Arctic to the East Indies and deep into Africa; Ptolemy was well aware that he knew about only a quarter of the globe. Related portalsSelected biography Piri Reis (full name Hadji Muhiddin Piri Ibn Hadji Mehmed) was an Ottoman-Turkish admiral and cartographer born between 1465 and 1470 in Gallipoli on the Aegean coast of Turkey. He is primarily known today for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation), a book which contains detailed information on navigation as well as extremely accurate charts describing the important ports and cities of the Mediterranean Sea. He gained fame as a cartographer when a small part of his first world map (prepared in 1513) was discovered in 1929 at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. The most surprising aspect was the presence of the Americas on an Ottoman map, making it the first Turkish map ever drawn of the Americas. Related WikiProjectsSelected quote
TopicsAtlas - Geography - Topography Cartography: Cartographers - History of cartography - Ancient world maps - World maps - Compass rose - Generalization - Geographic coordinate system - Relief depiction - Scale - Terra incognita - Planetary cartography Map projection: Azimuthal equidistant - "Butterfly" - Dymaxion - Gall-Peters - General Perspective - Goode homolosine - Mercator - Mollweide - Orthographic - Peirce quincuncial - Robinson - Sinusoidal - Stereographic Maps: Cartogram - Estate map - Geologic map - Linguistic map - Nautical chart - Pictorial map - Reversed map - Road atlas - Thematic map - Topographic map - Weather map - Web mapping - World map Things you can do
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