[Equatorial Africa - map with Ottoman script]

Post card size map in Ottoman script of Sub-Saharan West Africa from Mehmet Esref’s ‘Küccük Atlas’, a rare portfolio of loose-leaf maps with text in Ottoman Turkish, published in Istanbul in 1909.
This interesting map depicts all Sub-Saharan West Africa, extending from Dakar, Senegal, in the west, all the way east to Lake Tanganyika, on the far side of the Belgian Congo. The region is divided into the various colonial possessions of France, Britain, Portugal, Germany and Belgium, the legacy of the ‘Scramble for Africa’. While the region was far distant from Turkey, the Ottoman Empire had traditionally strong connections to the region, via the caravan routes that traversed the Sahara, to the north, providing links to the Ottoman ports of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Indeed, for centuries, large quantities of ivory and gold from West Africa found their way to Istanbul..

The present map comes from Mehmet Esref’s Kücük Atlas (Small Atlas), an unusual work of 128 loose-leaf postcard sized maps, housed within a portfolio cover and accompanied by a 32-page brochure. Even though the period before World War I saw a great flourishing of Ottoman cartography, the Kücük Atlas was extraordinary in that it included a wide range of regional maps of Asia and Africa, as well as thematic maps, that in some cases are probably the only Ottoman maps of those subjects.

The Kücük Atlas is very rare, Worldcat lists only a single example, at the Bogazici University Library, Istanbul. All individual maps from the atlas are likewise rare.
The present map comes from an incomplete example of the atlas, so is offered separately.