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Dear Maphist members, Due to lack of time I have not been a very attentive reader of the thread about the personification of Egypt (Africa) riding on a crocodile's back. There is, of course, a nice visual parallel with Europe riding on a bull, but has anyone already brought up that Pliny's "Naturalis Historia" (8,29) is a textual source for this iconography? Pliny tells that the inhabitants of Tentyrus ride on crocodiles. This is later repeated and depicted on medieval maps for the island of Meroe in the Nile: Ebstorf (Kugler, Bd. 2, 20/14) and Hereford (Westrem, nr. 292-293). These maps were probably not the direct iconographic examples for the personification of Africa on 16th c. maps, but there is an ongoing intellectual and cartographic tradition from the late Middle Ages to the 16th c. (sometimes even 17th - see my book) Margriet Hoogvliet
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