Ortelius’s two-sheet map of Ancient Egypt

A large and decoative map of Egypt drawn by Abraham Ortelius himself for his 'Parergon', his atlas of the Ancient World. The Nile is shown south to Philae, with the known cities and temples of Ancient Egypt along its length. Using classical writers like Diodorus, Herodotus, Strabo and Pliny as his sources, Ortelius created a map described by Peter Meurer of the University of Utrecht as 'an outstanding example of early scientific research on Egypt'. This example, without pagination numbers, comes from the first issue of the map, a Latin 'additamentum' of 1584, a collection of new maps not in the last edition of the full atlas. It is is relatively scarce: it was replaced in 1595 by a single-sheet version. Van den Broecke estimates only 1825 examples were printed in total and only 100 of this first issue.