Keith Thompson created this cartoonish map of Europe on the eve of World War I for Scott Westerfeld's graphic novel Leviathan:
When most of the world was not yet mapped, there were strange fictional creatures that supposedly lived there in place of the world's mysterious oceans. This is a 1550 map showing sea monsters:
And here is a sea monster, supposedly living off the North African coast of Sicily:
In this map of Asia from 1570, we see a rather curiously shaped Japan and a Pacific Ocean inhabited by mermaids and strange sea creatures:
Here is another old map of Southeast Asia from the mid-seventeenth century:
This decorative map of the North Pole was created by the famous cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1623:
Compare it with a map showing the current territorial claims in the Arctic from the countries bordering the North Pole:
And on the other side of the earth, on a map from 1570, we see an imaginary large southern continent, Terra Australis Incognita:
Have you ever wondered what Antarctica would look like without ice? One person describes it like this:
You can see how the national borders match up with the language spoken by the locals in this delightful language map of Europe:
And here we see the national distribution in perhaps the most famous multinational empire, the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire (1911):
German-speaking Europeans once belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, which, as it turned out, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire :) Just look at the many individual states belonging to the former Holy Roman Empire - this map is drawn in 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution:
How about an empire spread over three continents? Here we see the mighty Ottoman Empire under Suleiman I the Magnificent, around 1580:
Judging by this map, Gran Colombia included today's Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela, as well as parts of Guyana, Peru and Brazil.
And on this bright, delightful map of the USA, each state has its own (but actually alien) flag:
Amazing comparisons
Below is a map for those who have forgotten that Australia is also a continent. This map shows how big Australia is in relation to all of Western Europe:
This interesting map also reminds us of just how big Africa is compared to the largest countries in the world:
Unfortunately, Africa also stands out prominently on this map showing the ratio of inhabitants per doctor:
Whimsical illustrations in the cards
This curious map of Scotland is drawn in the form of ... a Scotsman, 1869 (lower left):
This is an earlier map showing Ireland as Lady Hibernia, 1795 (Hibernia is the Roman name for Ireland) (top right photo). It was drawn by Robert Dighton, a famous eighteenth-century portraitist and caricaturist.
This beautifully drawn map depicts the Netherlands and Belgium as a lion. In 1617, when the map was made, they were united as one country, although the territory was ruled by the Spanish:
British cartographer Lillian Lancaster drew this map depicting the American elections of 1880:
The map of Europe from Adidas is actually modern, it is dedicated to the Euro 2008 football championship:
Excellent educational material. Geographical maps "from the creation of the world" to the present day.
Originally posted by asaratov at The most unusual geographical maps of the world...
Terrible monsters that swallow ships, mysterious signs that accurately indicate the boundaries of storms and dangerous currents. Many people like maps, ancient maps, with sea serpents and terrible monsters swallowing ships in the wide expanses of the ocean, maps showing what the world looked like in the distant and not so distant past.
Jerusalem in the center, Itinerarium Sacrea Scripturea by Heinrich Banting, 1545-1606
The 1502 Contino Planisphere is the earliest surviving map showing the discoveries of Portuguese sailors to the west and east. It is considered the earliest map of the Americas (apart from the map called "America's Birth Certificate") and shows the Caribbean and part of the coast of Florida, as well as Africa, Europe and Asia with the coast of Brazil discovered a few years earlier:
Fragment: Europe and Jerusalem
Fragment: Caribbean Islands
Fragment: coast of Brazil (left), Persian Gulf (right)
Pietro Coppo's 1502 map is one of the last maps showing the so-called "Dragon's Tail", coming from Asia and based on the idea of Ptolemy, who 1500 years ago believed that the Indian Ocean was surrounded by land on all sides:
The next great map, the map of Venice, shows most of the buildings from 1565. Maps in this style are still quite common on tourist postcards and in guidebooks of this city:
From Asia's "Dragon Tail" to Mythical Sea Beasts
The ornate 1539 Carta Marina may seem incomplete by modern standards, but satellite imagery has shown that the sea monsters depicted in parts of the ocean on the map correspond to well-known storm fronts, currents, and other maritime hazards. This may have been a sign of warning to sailors of the time who dared to sail in those places:
Another map with monsters in the seas surrounding Iceland in the early 16th century:
A magnificent catalog of "sea monsters" inhabiting the ancient seas and the imagination of navigators
And finally, the whale island, printed in Novi Orbis Indiae Occidentals in 1621:
earth upside down
The southern parts of the planet were the most recent parts mapped by Europeans during the time of the great geographical discoveries. But the idea of "Terre Australis" appeared as early as the time of Aristotle in the 4th century. BC. Many different theories have arisen over the centuries: in the south the Indian Ocean is separated by land, the land of the northern hemisphere must be balanced by land in the southern hemisphere, Africa extends all the way to the South Pole. In 1820, Antarctica was finally discovered in an area that had previously always been associated with Australia. Here is a map from 1587. with a mythical continent occupying a vast part of the southern hemisphere:
Fragment of a decorative map of the world with Antarctica and part of North America, which was issued in Amsterdam in 1689:
The 1566 Italian map of North America is one of the first maps to show the northernmost parts, such as Canada:
Alternate history on hypothetical maps
The genre of alternative history has given rise to a certain part of the hypothetical maps. The following maps reflect what Europe might have been like if Germany had won in the 1940s:
In the same vein, a 1964 world map was drawn up based on the novel Fatherland, the idea of which is to assume that Germany won the Second World War. The III Reich is marked in red, the European Union representing Nazi allies and conquered nations in brown, colonial possessions in orange, US and allied possessions in blue, and neutral countries in yellow:
Next comes the map, compiled according to the novel by J. Orwell "1984." The areas on the map marked as contentious and leading to an eternal state of conflict between different power blocs are reminiscent of Cold War tensions in Africa and Asia between the superpowers:
In the 70s. K. Etzel Piercy, a professor of geography, proposed to reconsider the borders of the US states. According to his theory, the country should consist of 38 states with new names representing areas that are culturally and physically distinct from each other. Naturally, this idea was not implemented, but it is very interesting:
Another idea of revising the US borders took place in the advertising campaign of vodka "Absolute", which took place in Mexico and caused a great response. There have been calls in the US to boycott Swedish vodka. And yet the map has some real grounds, tk. Mexico lost the territories of Upper California and New Mexico during the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. Mexico ceded 42% of its territory, which later became the states of California, Nevada, and Utah, as well as parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Absolut apologized, noting that the advertisement was created for the Mexican market and did not mean that the company was against immigration, created anti-American sentiment, did not demand a revision of borders, etc.
For those who doubt the above, we present a map of Mexico in 1824 with territories later given to the United States:
Most history students are familiar with this map of Africa, dominated by European powers on the eve of World War I. After 1918 the German colonies were divided between Britain and France, and Africa remained under foreign control for decades to come. The color coding indicates the following: United Kingdom in red, France in blue, Portugal in purple, Germany in light green, Spain in pink, Italy in emerald green, Belgium in yellow. Only Ethiopia and Liberia, which were established as the homeland of freed slaves in the middle of the 19th century, remained independent:
It's hard to imagine today that a small country like Britain once owned a quarter of the world's land, including huge populations like India's. Here is the British Empire in the 1920s after the annexation of German colonies in Africa and the division of former Turkish territories in the Middle East between Britain and France:
Here are some similar maps from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is an Asian vision of the world situation during the Chinese Revolution of 1912. This map was published in Japan, but reflects the many foreign influences in China at the time. During this period, before the outbreak of World War II, the "Russian bear" poses a threat to all of Europe and Asia. Britain is depicted as a sea monster, reflecting the country's position as the dominant naval power at the time. Germany is depicted as a fanged warthog:
The map of the world, familiar to everyone from the school bench, made in the Mercator projection, is far from the only version of the image of our planet on a plane. All the modern variety of cartographic projections arose with one single goal - to depict the spherical Earth as accurately as possible on a sheet of paper. And since this is a very complex task, many options for solving it have been proposed. But all of them are far from ideal: somewhere there is too much distortion of distances, somewhere the angles are displayed incorrectly, and some options are too difficult to perceive. Nevertheless, among them there are many interesting solutions, which we offer to get acquainted with.
Projection "Butterfly"
This polyhedral projection got its name from the shape of a butterfly, and it was created at the beginning of the 20th century by the American cartographer Bernard Cahill.
Dymaxion projection
The Dimaxion projection, or Fuller projection, is a sweep of a polyhedron and can depict the globe in various ways. The projection was created by the American engineer Buckminster Fuller in the 40s of the last century. The length of each face of this polygon corresponds to the length of the arc of the globe, and the surface inside the triangle is compressed relative to its actual dimensions.
Hood projection
This map was created by American cartographer John Goode in 1923. It combines various types of projections that are designed to reduce area distortion compared to the traditional Mercator projection.
Werner projection
This pseudo-conical projection in the form of a heart was created at the beginning of the 16th century by the Austrian Johannes Stabius, and a little later supplemented and improved by the German priest Johannes Werner.
Pierce projection
This conformal projection was created by the American mathematician Charles Pierce in 1879.
