Urbano Monte - the secret map of the world

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The color atlas of the world, created by the cartographer Urbano Monte (years 1544-1613) 430 years ago (in 1587), was recently scanned and restored and made available to the public.

An old map shows the world as it was 430 years ago. Researchers have restored 60 pages of the Urbano Monte world atlas, which presents mysterious creatures such as the unicorn Sibirin, an ambirant ship, and terrible giant birds.

The manuscript map, 10 feet high and wide, was created by the little-known cartographer Urbano Monte in 1587. Monte was born into a well-to-do family in Milan and from childhood was fond of geography. It is known from historical sources that Monte met with a Japanese delegation that visited Milan in 1585. Therefore, his map provides extended information about Japan that was not found in other Western maps created at that time.

Monte worked on the atlas 18 years after Gerardus Mercator created the map that is now used in most educational institutions and smartphone apps. But Monte's map, unlike Mercator, depicts the Earth as seen from space, directly above the North Pole. Recently, the Mercator projection has been criticized for its Euro-centric portrayal, in which the western and northern regions are larger than they actually are.

According to collector David Rumsey, who bought the antique atlas and donated it to Stanford University's David Rumsey Cartography Center, which he founded in 2016, Renaissance cartographers disliked "empty spaces."

"I think Monte was actually trying to show the circular nature of the Earth," Ramsey said. It's more than just a map. It's a whole scientific tool."

The individual sheets and compositions of the fantastic map are now available on the Internet.

Interestingly, even 430 years ago, Urbano Monte drew everything very correctly and in great detail. And it was created just 80 years after Columbus discovered America, that you will agree a very short time to draw up such a detailed map, taking into account new discoveries. Indeed, in those days there were no satellites or aircraft, nothing with the help of which something similar could be created. And to create such a map 430 years ago, it was necessary to see the Earth precisely from the altitude of a modern aircraft or from the Earth's orbit.

How did the ancient cartographer manage to create such a detailed map that it can still be superimposed on the globe and get an amazing correspondence of the data. Interestingly, the Earth on this map is depicted not as a sphere, but as a convex disk centered on the North Pole, as depicted on the UN emblem, and the Moon and the Sun revolve around this flat and convex Earth.

This is a mystery, because this map is at the same time very accurate, to create it required serious data on cartography and its creator clearly knew what our planet would look like from space if the satellite that took the photographs was exactly above the North Pole, but at the same time the author of the map did not know that the Sun does not revolve around the Earth, but on the contrary the Earth revolves around the Sun.