I think what @i_love_FFT means is that on the Ottoman map you kinda get France, and then directly on the coastline right north of France you get Jutland. It’s sorta like if you took Europe and did a ripple cut to remove the Netherlands out of it.
What’s really interesting is the mild longitudinal shifts while latitudes are really good. No doubt this was in large part because we can use the direction of the sun and stars to get North or South, but for east or west you were much more dependent on precision timekeeping.
I think it’s just not aligned, they didn’t get the scale perfect. That pointy bit over the ocean and the bit hanging down from it are actually pretty close to right, just need to be moved over and twisted a bit.
It’s basically to make it clear and avoid confusion which can arise, e.g. by including only the European part of russia, as the Europe-Asia border is not uniquely defined.
In medieval Europe, spices from outside the world known to Europeans made it there through chains of traders and were luxury items. (IIRC, a spice from what is now Indonesia is recorded as having been a gift at a wedding in what is now Poland in the 13th century.) I’m guessing the definition of “known to” in this post is similar: Romans had access (at a price) to goods from these places, though nobody from the Roman world had actually been there, or even met anyone from there.
As far as the ancient European world goes, I think the furthest east they actually got were some sort-lived Greek-speaking states in the vicinity of India.
People would follow the silk road sometimes. Rome actually had limited diplomatic contact with China, even. That’s not on the map, maybe because they didn’t really understand where it was, besides somewhere far to the east. I’m surprised SE Asia is on it, I’ll have to do some reading about that, but India was known even to the Greeks.
Quality of information would drop off really rapidly with distance, though, since it was easy to make up a fish tale about what you saw in far-off lands, and so you find a lot of crazy BS mixed in with helpful nuggets in things like Herodotus’s Histories.
Most Roman thermae featured a caldarium, which was like a hot steam sauna and the really fancy ones even had a laconicum which was kinda like a hot, dry sauna.
If you flipped it upside down you’d have the orientation most common on medieval maps. In fact, the reason why we call it “orientation” (“orient” of course meaning “East”) is because you used to put a map upright by putting east on the top. This is because Jerusalem was seen as the rightful top of the map as it’s the city of God.
I’m also interested in the true size comparison without the skewed size that occurs further and further from the equator when you make a flat, rectangular map from a sphere.
On thetruesize.com they seem to use some equal-angle projection and the countries are reprojected while being moved. There, e.g. russia doesn’t seem to be that narrow when placed on top of Africa.
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