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One of the Earliest Printed World maps

A beautiful example of the Isidorus of Seville T-O World Map, which appeare in his Etymologiae De Summon Bono, published in Venice in 1483.

The woodcut map from the Etymologiae is an attractive example of a kind of mapmaking that predominated in Europe in the Middle Ages. East is depicted at the top of the map. Through its center runs the Mediterranean, flanked on either side by the Tanais (Don) and Nilus (Nile) Rivers. Europe is in the lower-left of the map, and Africa in the lower-right. The upper half is dominated by Asia. Each of the continents bears a name of one of Noah's three sons: Shem, Japeth, and Ham.

Isidorus of Seville, also Saint Isidore, was the Bishop of Seville in the seventh century A.D.  He compiled a manuscript encyclopedia of the knowledge of the ancients, helping preserve classical knowledge after the fall of the Roman Empire.

The first edition of the Etymologiae, which was accompanied by a woodcut T-O map, was published in 1472.

Medieval T-O World Maps

T-O maps are schematic medieval world diagrams that reduce the habitable earth to a circular “orbis terrarum” divided by a “T” into three parts—Asia occupying the upper half, with Europe at lower left and Africa at lower right. The vertical stroke of the T represents the Mediterranean Sea; the horizontal bar marks the combined course of the Don (Tanais) and the Nile, conventionally taken as a straight east-west line.

The design first appears in the seventh-century writings of Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae, Book XIV), where it served an exegetical rather than a navigational purpose, illustrating the tripartite division of Noah’s descendants—Shem in Asia, Japheth in Europe, and Ham in Africa. Because the maps were essentially theological diagrams, they are almost always oriented with Oriente—the East and the Garden of Eden—at the top, so Jerusalem sits near the center and Paradise crowns the page.

From the eighth to the thirteenth century the T-O scheme became the traditional choice of world images in Latin Christendom, copied into encyclopedic manuscripts, Psalters, and later printed chronicles. Larger mappae mundi such as the twelfth-century Sawley or the monumental Hereford and Ebstorf maps were actually more elaborate maps based upon the basic T-O template by adding concentric oceans, wind heads, biblical scenes, and classical lore, yet they still preserved the fundamental circular frame and T-shaped division.

By the early fifteenth century the geometrically gridded, coast-hugging portolan charts and the rediscovery of Ptolemaic longitude–latitude projections had begun to eclipse the T-O image for practical cartography, but the diagram persisted in didactic texts and devotional works well into the age of print, a potent visual shorthand for the medieval Christian conception of the world.

For a detailed description of the incunable T-O maps, see Campbell, The Earliest Printed Maps 1472-1600.