WALDSEEMÜLLER, M. - Septima Asie Tabvla.

Trapezoidal woodcut map showing the area east of the Caspian Sea with the Aral Sea from Martin Waldseemüller's most important 1513 edition of Ptolemy, which was a landmark work that contributed to major advances in both Renaissance geography and map printing.

A woodblock-printed large-format Ptolemaic map showing the region labeled SOGDIANA. Sogdia or Sogdiana was an ancient Iranian civilization between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, in present-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.

It is one of the earliest obtainable maps of the region. Central Asia and Turkistan, with a horizontal delineation of the Aral Sea.
The name Aral Sea appeared in the late 17th century. In Turkic, it was called Aral-Tengiz, meaning "sea of islands" or "island sea": aral – "island", tengiz – "sea". This is thought to relate to the many islands that were in the Amu Darya delta at that time.

Turkistan, the mystical land of Samarkand, was the farthest known reaches of the world, as known to Ptolemy. The map shows the mountainous area of Pamir and Imaus in the east, with the trade routes through the tribal areas of Bactria and Sogdiana with Scythia to the north.

“This complex territory constituted the Silk Road, a network of overland trails from China to the Mediterranean. Embracing parts of today’s Iran, China, India and the central Asian countries of the former Soviet Union, mysteries about the region’s geography and ethnology persisted until the end of the nineteenth century”. See: Nebenzahl, Mapping the Silk Road.

Although never politically united, the Sogdian city-states were centered on the city of Samarkand.
Sogdians also lived in Imperial China and rose to prominence in the military and government of the Chinese Tang dynasty (618–907 AD). Sogdian merchants and diplomats traveled as far west as the Byzantine Empire. They played an essential part as middlemen in the Silk Road trade route. The Caspian Sea is shown instead of having its longest diameter in a direction from north to south, it was described as longest from east to west (occupying 20 degrees from east to west) .

One reason for this view was that the Northern Ocean was still thought to come much nearer to it than it did and not to leave room in a northerly direction for the dimensions of this sea. Besides this, the lake Aral, being imperfectly known, was considered a part of the Caspian Sea.
The first learned traveler who substituted actual observations was the English merchant Mr. Jenkinson, who traveled in 1558 and 1561 at the expense of the Russian Mercantile Company of London.

The map was published by Johann Schott in Strasburg, and is in very fine contemporary colors.

From 1507 to 1513, Waldseemüller worked with his friend Mathias Ringman (1482-1522) at the new Latin edition of Ptolemy's Geographia, under the patronage of Duke René II of Lorraine.
While Ringmann corrected the text of the edition of Ptolemy, Waldseemüller deals with corresponding maps and the 20 modern maps. This book can be considered as the first modern atlas.