[Back]


Publications in Scientific Journals:

G. Timár, G. Molnár, B. Székely, K. Plihál:
"The map of Lazarus (1528) and the Ptolemian projection (in Hungarian)";
Geodézia és Kartográfia, 60 (2008), 7; 20 - 26.



English abstract:
The strange orientation of the map of Lazarus
(1528) has been a subject of a long debate of Hungarian
cartographers in the 20th century. In this
map, northeast is up, instead of the normal and
traditional orientation where the north is up. It
was long ago supposed that this orientation is a
result of the local/regional usage of the Ptolemian
projection of the world maps of the age of the map
construction. If a Ptolemian conic projection is defi
ned in the GIS environment with the parameters
of Φ1=0°, Φ2=64°and Λ0=90° (from Greenwich),
interestingly enough, the map can be rectifi ed and
the resulted image has right angles at its corners
and all sides are horizontal or vertical in the Ptolemian
coordinate system but not, of course, in the
modern ones. The linear rectifi cation errors in this
projection are more or less equal to the quadratic
ones in fi tting to modern coordinate systems eg. to
a UTM zone. It implies that the above projection
can be considered at least as a substituting one
or even the real projection of the Lazarus map. If
we consider this projection as a Ptolemian one, it
can be deduced that Lazarus used the equidistant
conic projection with two standard parallels: the
Equator and the Northern Circle, which is more or
less the same as the mysterious Parallel of Thule
in the maps of Ptolemy. In the map, however, the
main directions are rotated by 90°; the grid north
points to the original left indicated by the word
´Occidens´ (west), which is considered as an error
of the press preparation.


Electronic version of the publication:
http://www.fomi.hu/honlap/magyar/szaklap/2008/07/5.pdf


Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.