The Nile, which traverses about 6,825 kilometres, from its farthest and most remote source in southern Rwanda to the Mediterranean Sea, is the longest river system on earth. It comprises two major tributaries, the White Nile and the Abbay, also called ...
In 1879, the scientific journal Dr. A. Petermann’s Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt (PGM) presented its readers with a detailed map of the Tokyo Bay area and Mount Fuji, offering more geographical information than other European...
European exploration of Africa in the 19th century was based on the assumption that only little was known about the interior of the continent. For decades, geographical societies, cartographers, travellers and others repeatedly emphasised that the maps...
The development of the European cartography of north-east Africa was strongly associated with the 18th-, 19th‑ and early 20th-century missionaries and explorers. These travellers’ insights were informed by the local knowledge of indigenous people. Prio...
Northern Abyssinia (northern Ethiopia) is home to the ancient Aksumite Kingdom. Although its capital was in Aksum, the cultural boundaries of the kingdom extended as far as the modern state of Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula. According to Ethiopian and ...
Reaching a big milestone in 2023, we completed the digitisation of more than 35,000 maps from the Perthes Collection in Gotha. It comprises cartographic pieces that were collected as well as produced by Justus Perthes, one of the world’s leading geogra...
On the 12th and 13th of January 2023, we celebrated the successful completion of the project Cartographies of Africa and Asia (1800–1945). A Project for the Digitization of Maps of the Perthes Collection Gotha (KarAfAs) with our final conference Territ...
With the end of the year in sight and a detailed conference report forthcoming, this short note serves to remember the international conference Mapping Asia: Cartography and the Construction of Territoriality, which took place on the 24th and 25th of N...
The Centre for Transcultural Studies in Gotha hosted the annual meeting of a network of scholars in residence from Ethiopia at the 20th and 21st October 2022. The Gerda Henkel Foundation’s unfaltering support enables them, despite the civil war in Ethi...
On Friday, May 4, 1906, Bruno Domann left his desk at the Perthes publishing house in Gotha carrying travel accounts, maps and instruments. However, he did not take the materials home in order to finish maps for the new printing run of the Stieler’s Ha...
