The Khalili Portolan Atlas takes its reader on a tour through what comes to feel like a familiar, coherent world of Mediterranean ports. Most notable among the features of individual charts within the Atlas are the frequent appearance of detailed ship illustrations and the use of highly schematized coastlines with rounded inlets. The Atlas also presents city views of Istanbul, Venice, and Cairo, as well as numerous illustrations of mountains and rivers. Place names appear in Arabic script. The Atlas does not provide directions on how to get from one port to the next, nor do its individual maps provide noticeable changes in scale to provide a spatial context for viewing each individual map. However, the distinct style of the coastlines and familiarity of the ships provide a sense of continuity as the reader flips from one page to the next. In addition to its artistic merit, the Khalili Portolan Atlas is notable for its adaptation of charts from Piri Reis’s kitāb-i bahrīye (Book of Navigation), itself a landmark in the history of sixteenth-century Mediterranean cartography for its exhaustive coverage of the Mediterranean coasts and islands. Composed in the late seventeenth-century, the Khalili Portolan Atlas draws extensively on the wealth of pictorial and factual information provided by Piri Reis’s early sixteenth-century charts of the Mediterranean. (Ryan Baldwin '19)
London, Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Arts, MS 718.
Soucek, Svatopluk and Muʼassasat Nūr al-Ḥusayn. Piri Reis & Turkish Mapmaking after Columbus. London: Nour Foundation in Association with Azimuth Editions, 1992.
Special Collections, Carleton College, Northfield, MN.
Rights for maps held by individual publishers and institutions. Thumbnails displayed constitute fair use.
Carleton Gould Library Special Collections (Folio), GA1303.5.A1 S65 1992