The cartouche of the Colonial Wall Map, which was first produced by the Justus Perthes publishing house in 1909, is artistically drawn.1 A black-and-white frame surrounds several colourful maps showing the Pacific Ocean regions that were part of the Ge...
Headrests have been used for thousands of years in different regions around the world. Therefore, it is not surprising that they can be found in various shapes and sizes in many German ethnographic collections, many of which are from Ethiopia. There, h...
On a winter morning in 1875, the geographer Johannes Justus Rein was staying at the German Legation in Tokyo. For over a year, Rein had been conducting field research in Japan under the auspices of a government-sponsored expedition. In a letter to Augu...
The Russian campaign in Central Asia can be viewed as an episode in the long history of this territory. Claiming the city of Tashkent in 1865, the fortress of Samarkand in 1868 and the Khanate of Khiva in 1873 were all ground-breaking events of Central...
In 1903 a complaint by a British official about “leaking German-Cameroonian borders” (Weiss 2000: 168) reached Garoua, the centre of German colonial administration in German-Adamawa, Cameroon. More complaints from the British Protectorate of Nigeria fo...
For many years I have undertaken extensive research on the maps in the British Library’s Wise Collection – showing the route between Lhasa in Central Tibet and Ladakh in the Western Himalayas over a length of more than ten metres (Lange 2020). They wer...
Josef Menges and German Exploration in the Horn of Africa Following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the coastal territories of the Horn of Africa became the focus of increasing interest by foreign powers, agencies, and individuals, who were attr...
Africa’s largest lake, known to this day by its colonial name Lake Victoria, features an indentation in the south-west that many texts and maps refer to as Emin Pasha Gulf (Fig. 1). Located in the Tanzanian part of the lake, this indentation has a surf...
Maps are made from maps. This can also be traced in August Petermann’s commentary for his latest map of Northern Abyssinia in 1867, published in Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen (PGM). The senior cartographer of the Perthes publishing house in Got...
The Orientalist Hiob Ludolf stands at the beginning of Ethiopian philology and early ethnographic research on north-east Africa. Ludolf’s works are remarkable in their richness of cultural information and their breadth. Especially his cooperation with ...
