Atlas historique du golfe Persique (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles)

The work under discussion is the first volume of a historical atlas of the Persian Gulf and is the result of a joint editorial project of the Parisian École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the University of Tehran and the Iranian Center of Documentation and Diplomatic History. It was edited by Dejanirah Couto, Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont and Mahmoud Taleghani, and coordinated by Zoltán Biedermann. Patrick Gautier Dalché and Elio Brancaforte collaborated in the production of this volume. The editors of this trilingual publication (French, English and Persian) set themselves the task of tracing the evolution of the cartographic representations of the Persian Gulf between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century. For this purpose, they selected around a hundred western maps, both prints and manuscripts, some of which had never been published before. The presentation of these maps – which consists almost always of the reproduction of the full image of the maps side by side with the amplified image of the Gulf area depicted in them, even when they are just maps of this specific region – is organized according to the main national traditions that produced the most representative pieces of the whole during the period under consideration: the cartographic “schools” of Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Britain and Germany. Each of these traditions is dealt with in a separate chapter, introduced by an essay which sums up the general conditions of production, circulation and preservation of the maps in question. All the maps’ reproductions are accompanied by notes identifying them from a technical point of view and by a brief historical comment, which helps to retrace the relations between the several “schools” by giving indications of the charts’ genealogy. A list of the toponyms to be found in the amplified section of each of the maps in the atlas is also included.