Arabien

Description

Less than a century after Carsten Niebuhr’s Danish Arabia Expedition, this Weimar Geographisches Institut by Carl Weiland leaves no doubt that a new era of scientific mapping of Arabia has arrived. Gone are the fictitious imaginations of an interior with lakes and mountain ranges. Instead we have significant cartographic undertaking that seeks to accurately map the towns and roads which connect them, especially the pilgrim routes to and from Mecca and Medina.

The map extends into Syria-Palestine as far as Tripoli and Homs, into Iraq to include Baghdad and Basra, and east across the Persia Gulf to Shiraz, Isfahan, and Qom.

It features two important insets. The first, in the upper right corner, presents Rüppel’s map of the Sinai Peninsula, which represented a major advance in the mapping of the upper Red Sea. The second, in the lower right corner, highlights the territory of Derayeh, an important fortified center in the 19th century, which would eventually expand out to become today’s capital of Riyadh.