India Intra et Extra Gangem

Circa 1720

Original hand-coloured copper engraving on paper

Print size: 12.5 x 15.5 in (31.5 x 39.5 cm)
Sheet size: 13.75 x 17 in (35 x 43 cm)

India Intra et Extra Gangem—A Transitional Early-Eighteenth-Century Map Structured Around the Gangetic World

Christoph Weigel’s India Intra et Extra Gangem offers a compelling early-eighteenth-century synthesis of ancient learning and modern geographic awareness. Published in Nuremberg around 1720 for Weigel’s Descriptio Orbis Antiqui, the map is explicitly structured around Ptolemy’s enduring division of “India within the Ganges” and “India beyond the Ganges”—a conceptual framework that shaped European thought for nearly fifteen centuries. Yet within this classical projection, Weigel incorporates markedly updated eighteenth-century topography, extending the map’s scope eastward from the Indian subcontinent to Vietnam and the coasts of the Sinus Magnus.

Ptolemaic place-names and antique city references persist throughout, but the coastal profiles reflect knowledge filtered through Portuguese, Dutch, and Jesuit encounters across the Indian Ocean world. Northern India and the Gangetic basin serve as the pivotal threshold between South Asia and Southeast Asia, while the great river systems of Burma and the interior converge toward the legendary Lake Chiamay, retained here as the imagined hydrological source of Asia’s principal rivers—a vivid reminder of how inherited models endured even as empirical geography advanced.

The map is further distinguished by its extraordinary allegorical cartouche: a dramatic war elephant, improbably rotund and clad in armour, bears an enclosed, fortress-like howdah crowded with soldiers firing upon enemies below. The title banner itself is placed beneath the elephant, integrating spectacle and inscription. Such imagery—drawn from a mixture of traveller’s reports, trader’s tales, and engraver’s invention—underscores the hybrid nature of Weigel’s vision, poised between reality and fantasy.

Notably, this map stands apart from contemporary Dutch, French, or English productions. Germany possessed no active colonial foothold in India, and Weigel himself was not a traveller; his India is therefore a learned European construction, shaped by books, engravings, and second-hand intelligence rather than imperial administration. Scarcer on the market than many Western European equivalents, this exceptionally rare hand-coloured sheet remains a striking document of the transitional moment just before scientific cartography fully transformed the mapping of South Asia.

NON-EXPORTABLE

This lot is offered at RESERVE

This lot will be shipped in "as is" condition. For further details, please refer to the images of individual lots as reference for the condition of each lot.