Unknown to literature :
SIBERIA
Siberie, Carte Geographique contenant le Royaume de, (subdivided in three provinces, namely Tobolsk, Yenisseyesk, Irkutsk, and outer parts of the Tartary). With miles indicator, a small map of the Chukchi (Chukotsk) Peninsula (c. 4 x 8 cm), annotations to the districts and
a large figurative colored title-cartouche
(19.3 x 22 cm) with a stylized icicle, steppe landscape with reindeer sledge, whale and polar bears, one of them devouring a fish. On top of it six winds. Colored two-sheet-map c. 1 : 13 millions engraved by Matthäus Albrecht Lotter (1741 Augsburg 1810) for Tobias Conrad Lotter (1717 Augsburg 1777). Probably 1770/75, but not before/after 1759 and 1776/77 resp. Inscribed: Publiée par Tobie Conrad Lotter Géogr. d’Augsbourg / Gravée par Matthieu Albert Lotter, à Auguste., otherwise as before.
49.6-50.1 x 108.4 cm.
Unknown to Tooley and , particularly , Grenacher ,
Guide to the cartographic history of the imperial city of Augsburg, in Imago Mundi XXII (1968), 85 ff. – Not in the British Library and the Library of Congress. – In the right white upper margin numbered with „121“ by old hand. – The two sides trimmed on or just inside the wide platemark.
Secured corner points of the dating are 1759 as the earliest evidence of an engraver signature by the son Matthäus Albrecht (map of Pomerania) + 1777 as the year of death of Tobias Conrad who had established the publishing house as an independent business in 1758, after he had managed together with further heirs the publishing house of his father-in-law Matthäus Seutter died in 1757. That the publisher’s address above names him as still living is granted in respect of the par Tobie Conrad Lotter, but especially by the addition Géogr(apher). This contrary to the apud Tob. Conr. Lotter on the 1784 posthumous German edition of the 1776 map of Russia by Ivan Fomic Treskot (Trescotti, Tresskott, Trouskot, Truscott, 1721-1786) as the 3rd General Map of the country as the most far-reaching one to west + east closing an epoch of gigantic cartographic development initiated by Peter the Great lasting 60 years only. Lotter publishers on their part gone out with the death of the son in 1810.
A closer limitation to c. 1770/75 the map image offers in comparison with other ones. So the Asiatic NE coast from Japan up to the Cape Szalaginskoi (Cape Schelagskij) as a nose together with the Bear Islands corresponds astonishingly with depiction and marking on the maps by Rigobert Bonne of Russia and the Chinese Tartary published at Lattré in Paris 1771. Noticeable especially the shape of Sakhalin which appears hitherto substantially more compact, here, however, presents a slender form coming visibly closer to nature, at which Cape Patience (Palience on the Lattré maps) making the south point of the island as a result of the still missing long extended south part west of the cape.
Of great likeness, too,
the still thoroughly clumsy depiction of Jesos (= Hokkaido) taking up wide parts of the Japanese Sea as sufficiently known by numerous, though by far not all maps of the 18th century. The Kurile Islands adjacent in NE direction with rich detail marking, but still without the term as a chain of islands as then at least on the 1784 edition of the Treskot map. As then on the other side the obscure islands Terre des Etats (Iturup) and Terre de la Compagnie – both still on the Siberia map here – missing as only still recollections of the great age of sometimes only vague discoveries on the latter as well as the frequently joined da Gama Land figurating as Terre de Jean de Gama for instance still on Janvier’s map of Asia at Lattré of the early 70s.
Remarkable that Lotter added to both imaginary islands the reference supplied with interrogation mark dans les cartes Russe?. This probably to be judged as a sign for an independent work of Lotter’s who obviously got his knowledge from several sources and not only copied a map got into his hands for a German edition.
Further indications for a publication of the Lotter map at the beginning/middle of the 1770s at the latest the adoption of the shape of the Chukotsk Peninsula in the outermost NE of Asia
practically being unchanged since Ivan Kirilov’s (1695-1737) General Map of 1734 as the first Russian at all, whose form valid up today only Treskot documents as well as the Matochkin Strait as parting Novaya Zemlya
as probably recorded for the first time by him. In view of the obviously independency of Lotter’s map of Siberia in both cases a recourse to elder forms of representation would appear little probable.
That by the way definitely more current entries are to be found alongside of other ones being neglected lies in the nature of the matter, but requires, nevertheless, an enlarged investigation. So for instance Sakhalin + Jeso lack in contrast to Lotter’s Siberia any detail marks on Treskot’s General Map as found at him yet at outer Russian regions. To conclude from this on a younger date of the Lotter map would ignore their presence on maps published for certain before Treskot as e.g. the 1721 Bonne maps at Lattré as already called in.
Whether the map here eventually was worked for Lotter’s 24 sheet “so-called ‘Monumentalatlas’” (Grenacher, op. cit., p. 102) edited 1770 must be left open for the time being.
Designed in cone projection, the null meridian runs about 020° western longitude of Greenwich through the centre of Iceland. In the west reaching till Novaya Zemlya – Ural Mountains – Kazan – Sea of Azov, the map comprises in the far east still northern Japan , the Kurile Islands and Kamchatka including the offshore Bering Island . Southerly still with at the Caspian Sea , Lake Aral , the headwaters of the Yenisey , the Dalai nuur (Hulun Lake) in northern Mongolia close to the wall of Genghis Chan , the region of today’s Vladivostok and the Tsugari Street . In the Arctic Ocean up to 78° northern latitude. Thus all that perfectly beautiful comprising what Dostoyevsky let jubilate
“ Away from Petersburg , the European ,
It is whose
extraordinarily scarce detail map
– Treskot’s Siberia map (BMC XXII, 353: about 1770; Tooley’s Dict.: 1775) for instance
only comprising the west Siberian districts Tobolsk and Yeniseysk –
from the days
when modern cartography opened up the Russian Empire
at a tremendous pace .
Standing not least, too, for
„the splendid and successful epoch
of the Augsburg map production of the 18th century“
(Lothar Zögner).
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