Piri Reis Map

1,000 Art Puzzle (48 x 68)
Piri Reis Map
Piri Reis
Production Date Unknown

This puzzle was a pleasure to build, taking me a couple of days while vacationing in Antalya. I was very impressed with the quality of the pieces. The image quality and finish are excellent and the pieces fit perfectly, so there was no chance of "false fits."

From Wikipedia:

The Piri Reis map is a world map compiled in 1513 by the Ottoman admiral and cartographer Piri Reis. Approximately one third of the map survives, housed in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. After the empire's 1517 conquest of Egypt, Piri Reis presented the 1513 world map to Ottoman Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–1520). It is unknown how Selim used the map, if at all, as it vanished from history until its rediscovery centuries later. When rediscovered in 1929, the remaining fragment garnered international attention as it includes a partial copy of an otherwise lost map by Christopher Columbus.

The map is a portolan chart with compass roses and a windrose network for navigation, rather than lines of longitude and latitude. It contains extensive notes primarily in Ottoman Turkish. The depiction of South America is detailed and accurate for its time. The northwestern coast combines features of Central America and Cuba into a single body of land. Scholars attribute the peculiar arrangement of the Caribbean to a now-lost map from Columbus that merged Cuba into the Asian mainland and Hispaniola with Marco Polo's description of Japan. This reflects Columbus's erroneous claim that he had found a route to Asia. The southern coast of the Atlantic Ocean is most likely a version of Terra Australis.

The map is visually distinct from European portolan charts, influenced by the Islamic miniature tradition. It was unusual in the Islamic cartographic tradition for incorporating many non-Muslim sources. Historian Karen Pinto has described the positive portrayal of legendary creatures from the edge of the known world in the Americas as breaking away from the medieval Islamic idea of an impassable "Encircling Ocean" surrounding the Old World.