The World In Two Hemispheres by Zahn; Historic Map, 1696

This is a museum-grade reproduction of the 1693 double hemisphere map of the world in two panels. Drawn and engraved by the German Enlightenment era polymath Johann Zahn for his pseudo-scientific opus Mundus Mirabili, or the "Marvelous World." This, Zahn's cartographic masterpiece, is a smorgasbord of carto-curiosity featuring such unusual elements as an insular California, the Great Lakes rendered as a single body of water open to the west, the strait of Anian far to the north, El Dorado or Manoa on the shores of the mythical Lake Parima, the legendary Lago de los Xarayes, an erroneously oriented Caspian Sea, a speculative Ptolemaic mapping of the sources of the Nile, an incomplete Australia, and the five great rivers of southeast Asia radiating from a single apocryphal lake , among others. Our survey of this map will begin with North America on the western hemisphere sheet. North America is rendered according to the common 17th century Dutch conception and owes much to the work of Nicholas Visscher whose maps played a significant role in promoting the "California as an Island" hypothesis. The concept of an insular California first appeared as a work of fiction in Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo's c. 1510 romance Las Sergas de Esplandian, where he writes Know, that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise; and it is peopled by black women, without any man among them, for they live in the manner of Amazons.