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Earliest Extant Map of the Nile

Muḥammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi

A map of the Nile from the sole surviving manuscript of al-Khwarizmi's Geography, reworking Ptolemy's coordinates of the known world.

This map comes from al-Khwarizmi's own Geography, showing his reworking of earlier knowledge into a new picture of the world.

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Two facing pages of an Arabic manuscript with black ink text in the margins and a colored diagram in the center: a blue and red river system with branching channels and lakes, a green rectangular panel on the left, and a brown curved shape on the right. Labels in Arabic are written along the diagram.
Map of the Nile from al-Khwarizmi's Kitab Surat al-Ard (Picture of the Earth). Strasbourg manuscript.

About this source

What it is

This colored map of the Nile comes from the only surviving manuscript of al-Khwarizmi's Kitab Surat al-Ard (Picture of the Earth), held in Strasbourg. It uses gouache and ink to show the river's branching channels and lakes.

Why it matters

Al-Khwarizmi's geography reworked the coordinates recorded earlier by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy into a new picture of the world as known in the ninth century. This map is one of the oldest surviving examples of Islamic geographic mapmaking and shows how Greek knowledge was transmitted and reshaped by Islamic scholars.

Look closer

  • What details on the map tell you it was made by hand rather than surveyed with modern instruments?
  • Why might a mathematician like al-Khwarizmi also have worked on geography?
  • What might this map get wrong or leave out compared to a modern map of the Nile?

This artifact is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Al-Khwarizmi on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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Primary source

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Primary source

Algebra Manuscript, Bodleian MS. Huntington 214

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Secondary source

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Secondary source

Zij Manuscript, Corpus Christi College MS 283

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Secondary source

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