Does the Qatar Map of the Tigris and Euphrates belong to Evliya Çelebi?

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When one examines the magnificent work of Evliya Çelebi (1611 – c.1685), one of the greatest travelers the world has ever known, one is struck by something lacking — viz., maps. This despite the fact that Evliya frequently mentions ancient books of geography and atlases in his work, and lays particular stress on the importance of the guild of mapmakers in seventeenth-century Istanbul. Despite this, there are no maps in the manuscripts of the work that have come down to us. It seems rather strange that Evliya Çelebi, who aimed to provide information on every topic and who, moreover, was evidently knowledgable about cartography, should have left his work — and left us — deprived of maps. Indeed, Evliya Çelebi experts have always drawn attention to this situation. This concern led researchers to look for such maps, and already in 1949 one researcher suggested that a seventeenth-century map of the Nile in the Vatican Library might belong to Evliya Çelebi. Unfortunately it took another sixty years before this suggestion was confirmed.

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The Journal Of Ottoman Studies

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The Journal Of Ottoman Studies