File talk:KangnidoPoliticalDetails-mediterrane-blue.png
This is a quote from a mailing list:
[KS] Old Korean maps of Europe? gkl1 at columbia.edu gkl1 at columbia.edu Wed Apr 26 21:29:23 EDT 2006
Wikipedia (for once!), is correct. But the misunderstanding is understandable. The circa 1471 copy of the Kangnido (the Ry^ukoku Daigaku copy, which is the oldest known copy of the long lost 1402 original) contained an error in that the copyist apparently didn't recognize that the Mediterranean and Black seas were bodies of water and not countries, and so did not color them with the same ocean color (which over the centuries has become black), but rather left them undifferentiated from the land areas. The same error was made in the Tenri University copy (believed to be from about 1568; see illustration in my coverage, cited in my earlier message today, p. 244), but in that case the delineation was a little more careful and the identities of the areas in question are much more clearly the Mediterranean and the Black Seas.
The treatment of these seas by the original cartographer (either of the Islamic source map, the Chinese copy of it, or the original Kangnido of 1402) was a bit confused. The Italian and Greek peninsulas were pushed almost together, leaving only a channel between them, and the Black Sea poured through it into the Mediterranean--thus really through the Adriatic rather than the Bosporus. That much said, it is much easier to interpret the sea areas than the land ones, Spain comes out the most clearly, and Italy and Greece are readily detectable while the rest is pretty much a blur. This too is quite understandable given the ultimate Islamic source.
Gari Ledyard
Source: http://koreaweb.ws/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreaweb.ws/2006-April/005583.html
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