A 16th century woocut map of Africa after Ptolemy

A woodcut map of Africa according to Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, whose 'Geographia' (a gazetteer of the Roman world and treatise on mapmaking written about AD 150) had a profound influence on the development of Renaissance cartography. It shows North Africa from the Canary Islands to the Red Sea, with rivers crossing the region of the Sahara Desert, and a depiction of the mythical Christian emperor Prester John in Ethiopia. South of the Equator there is little detail other than mountain ranges, the twin sources of the Nile in the Mountains of the Moon, and a note that in Ethiopia are elephants, thinoceroses and tigers. The landmass continues off the bottom of the map, with no suggestion of the Cape of Good Hope. The title (as above) is on the reverse, above a Latin text surrounded by ornate woodcut columns and a woodcut illustration of a child riding on an elephant's trunk, watched by his mother. This example is comes from block reduced from Wäldseemüller's original by Lorenz Fries. It was intended not for an edition of Ptolemy but for a new 'Chronica mundi' being written by Wäldseemüller. However his death c.1520 caused the project to be shelved, so the woodcuts were used to publish a smaller sized and so cheaper edition of the 'Geography'.