JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Well, these look unusual to me, mainly because I do not understand the representation of the Sun in either image.  The first image (printed I guess around 1860) is the easier of the two, showing the Oikoumene, the inhabited world, of the Earth as known to Herodotus, the orbis herodoti, of the 5th century bce.  All of the land to the right (south) is Libya, Arabia, Persia, and India, all undifferentiated, though we can see the Nile delta. The two main land masses poking into the sea are Thrace and Phrygia, with

no sign of very much to the west of that, no sign of Italy, nothing for the Celtic regions or Iberia, with some hint of polar regions.  Why the Sun is so, I am not sure.  

The red Sun makes another appearance in the outline of the solar system, in the next image.  It is red, and brilliantly so, and firey; in the place of the Earth in the third sphere is the Moon, and beyond that another yellow firey star, which I take to be, perhaps, our own planet.  I can’t read this one, the yellow star and all…though it is very pretty.