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A richly composed historiographical map from Henri Abraham Chatelain’s Atlas Historique, blending classical geography, early modern ethnography, and biblical chronology into a single didactic tableau. At center, a double-hemisphere projection emphasizes the eastern half of the world, labeled with ancient names and overlaid with a taxonomy of peoples, cities, and dominions. The Americas appear in an inset framed within the Indian Ocean, an arrangement that visually declares the New World as separate from and subsidiary to the historical narrative of the Old.
Surrounding the map are tabular genealogies of the four great monarchies as then understood (the Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman), each accompanied by lists of kings and approximate dates. Beneath the map, seven finely engraved vignettes depict the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, each identified by letter and captioned: Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Pyramids of Egypt, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Olympian Zeus, and the Pharos of Alexandria. A note invites further study in the Histoire du Monde by Chatelain’s collaborator, “Monsieur Chevreau.”
The map reflects the ambition of early Enlightenment encyclopedism: to synthesize global history and geography into a legible, rational structure. Printed in Amsterdam by the Huguenot exile Chatelain, the Atlas Historique was issued in multiple volumes between 1705 and 1720 and became one of the most influential pedagogical atlases of the period. This example is in strong contemporary hand color, with clear impression and good margins.
Henri Abraham Chatelain (1684-1743) was a Huguenot pastor of Parisian origins. Chatelain proved a successful businessman, creating lucrative networks in London, The Hague, and then Amsterdam. He is most well known for the Atlas Historique, published in seven volumes between 1705 and 1720. This encyclopedic work was devoted to the history and genealogy of the continents, discussing such topics as geography, cosmography, topography, heraldry, and ethnography. Published thanks to a partnership between Henri, his father, Zacharie, and his younger brother, also Zacharie, the text was contributed to by Nicolas Gueudeville, a French geographer. The maps were by Henri, largely after the work of Guillaume Delisle, and they offered the general reader a window into the emerging world of the eighteenth century.
