Magnus Sinus
Geography (Harleian MS 7182
)The Magnus Sinus or Sinus Magnus (
Renaissance cartographers before the Age of Discovery. It was then briefly conflated with the Pacific Ocean
before disappearing from maps.
History
The gulf and its major port of
his Geography.[8] Ptolemy (and presumably Marinus before him) followed Hipparchus in making the Indian Ocean a landlocked sea, placing Cattigara on its unknown eastern shoreline. The expanse formed between it and the Malay Peninsula (the "Golden Chersonese"), he called the Great Gulf.[9]
Book of the Description of the Earth, therefore, removed Ptolemy's unknown shores from the Indian Ocean. The robustly-described lands east of the Great Gulf, however, were retained as a phantom peninsula (now generally known as the Dragon's Tail
).
Just after 1295,
Ortelius and others.[11] (Some modern South American scholars have returned to the idea as recently as the 1990s, but there remains no substantial evidence to support the idea.[12]) The Great Gulf was finally dispensed with in all its forms as more accurate accounts returned from both the East and West Indies
.
Details
The details of the Great Gulf changed somewhat among its various forms, but the ancient and Renaissance
circumference of the Earth to follow Ptolemy's reduced figures or even smaller ones, cartographers during the early phases of the Age of Discovery expanded the Gulf to form the Pacific Ocean west of South America, considered to represent a southeastern peninsula
of Asia.
Modern reconstructions agree in naming the
Kingdom of Nanyue but identifications of Ptolemy's Cattigara with Han-era Nanhai, though common in the past,[17][18]
are credited little more than those placing it in Peru.
Notes
- ^ "Marinus does not exhibit the mileage from the Golden Chersonese to Cattigara. But he says that Alexander has described the land beyond to lie facing the south, and that after sailing by this for 20 days you reach the city of Zaba, and still saying on for some days southward but rather to the left [i.e., east] you reach Cattigara. He exaggerates the distance, for the expression is some days not many days. He says indeed that no numerical statement of the days was made because they were so many: but this I take to be ridiculous."[7]
Citations
- ^ Ptolemy (c. 150), Vol. VII, §3 & 5.
- ^ Agathemerus, Vol. I, p. 53.
- ^ a b Glover (2005).
- ^ a b Suárez (1999), p. 99.
- ^ Ptolemy (c. 150).
- ^ Yule (1866), p. cl.
- ^ Ptolemy,[5] translated by Yule.[6]
- ^ Ptolemy (c. 150), Vol. I, §14.
- ^ Bunbury (1911), p. 625.
- ^ Bunbury (1911), p. 624.
- ^ Suárez (1999), p. 71.
- ^ Richardson (2003).
- ^ d'Anville (1763).
- ^ Vaux (1854b).
- ^ Herrmann (1938).
- ^ Malleret (1962).
- ^ Smith (1854).
- ^ Vaux (1854a).
References
- Agathemerus, Tē̂s Geōgraphías Hypotypṓseis en Epitomē̂i τῆς γεωγραφίας ὑποτυπώσεις ἐν ἐπιτομῇ [A Sketch of Geography in Epitome] (in Greek)
- d'Anville, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon (1763), Orbis Veteribus Notus [The World Known to the Ancients] (in Latin), Paris
- Bunbury, Edward Herbert; Beazley, C. Raymond (1911), , in Chisholm, Hugh (ed.), Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 22 (11th ed.), Cambridge University Press, pp. 623–626.
- Glover, Ian C. (2005), "Cattigara", in Hornblower, Simon; Spawforth, Antony (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed.), Oxford University Press, p. 292, ISBN 9780198606413
- Herrmann, Albert (1938), "Der Magnus Sinus und Cattigara nach Ptolemaeus" [The Magnus Sinus and Cattigara in Ptolemy], Géographie Historique et Histoire de la Géographie, Comptes Rendus du 15me Congrès International de Géographie, Amsterdam, 1938 (in German), vol. II, Leiden: Brill, §IV, pp. 123–128
- Malleret, Louis (1962), "XXV: Oc-Èo et Kattigara" [Oc-Èo and Cattigara], L'Archéologie du delta du Mékong [Archaeology of the Mekong Delta] (in French), vol. III, pp. 421–454
- Geōgraphikḕ Hyphḗgēsis Γεωγραφικὴ Ὑφήγησις[The Geography] (in Greek), Alexandria
- Richardson, William A.R. (2003), "South America on Maps before Columbus? Martellus's 'Dragon's Tail' Peninsula", Imago Mundi, vol. 55, pp. 25–37, S2CID 129171245
- Smith, Philip (1854), "Cattigara", in Smith, William (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, Illustrated by Numerous Engravings on Wood, vol. I, London: Walton & Maberly, p. 570
- Suárez, Thomas (1999), Early Mapping of Southeast Asia, Singapore: Periplus Editions, ISBN 9781462906963
- Vaux, William Sandys Wright (1854a), "Cottiaris", in Smith, William (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, Illustrated by Numerous Engravings on Wood, vol. I, London: Walton & Maberly, p. 698
- Vaux, William Sandys Wright (1854b), "Magnus Sinus", in Smith, William (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, Illustrated by Numerous Engravings on Wood, vol. II, London: Walton & Maberly, p. 253
- Yule, Henry (1866), "Extracts from the Geography of Ptolemy. (Circa A.D. 150)", Cathay and the Way Thither; Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China with a Preliminary Essay on the Intercourse between China and the Western Nations Previous to the Discovery of the Cape Route, vol. I, London: Hakluyt Society, pp. cxlvi–cliii