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Al-Khwarizmi’s map of the Nile, one of the earliest-known maps depicting the Nile (this is also an example of one of the earliest Islamicate maps produced on paper), became a model for depicting the river in nearly every cartographic manuscript for centuries.
This map was part of an 11th-century manuscript copy of al-Khwarizmi’s Kitab surat al-‘ard (Book of a picture of the earth) published in English under the title The Oriental Geography of Ebn Hawqal (1800).
Al-Khwarizmi shows how the Nile emerges from the mythical Mountains of the Moon (now Ethiopia), flows through multiple cataracts and heads north, crosses the equator to pass through the lands of Nubia, Aswan and Beja toward Fustat (medieval Cairo) and finishes in the Nile Delta..
near Dumyat (Damietta), where it empties into the Mediterranean Sea. Cartographers replicated this depiction of the Nile in various ways in every cartographic manuscript thereafter for centuries.
As copies proliferated throughout the medieval Islamic world, this helped establish what became, in effect, the world’s first geographical atlas series.
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