A 16th century woocut map of India 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 India from the Indus river to the Ganges, with the subcontinent extending not much further south that Gujarat. Off the south west coast is 'Taprobana', the semi-mythical depiction of Sri Lanka. The title (as above) is on the reverse, above a Latin text surrounded by ornate woodcut columns. 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'.