“Reysen der Kinder von Israel aus Egypten.” Double-page woodcut map.

From: Heinrich Buenting, Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae. Magdeburg, Andreas Duncker 1600. Pt. I, p. 29-30. Depiction of the southern part of the Holy Land and the Nile Delta, delineating the route of the Jewish People’s exodus from Egypt with numbered and captioned stops along the way. Of particular interest here are many miniatures cityscapes and the dramatic Biblical scene of Pharaoh and his army drowning in the Red Sea. What is likely Jonah (a merman?) riding the back of a sea creature appears in the Mediterranean Sea. This is one of ten maps by Buenting (1545-1606) in which he rewrote the Bible as an illustrated travel book. Other maps in the series attest to Buenting’s imaginative approach to cartography, wherein he depicts the world in the form of a cloverleaf, Europe as the Queen of the World and Asia as the horse Pegasus.