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RAMUSIO AND JACOPO GASTALDI.   179

special interest as it shows how difficult it was for the cartographers to abandon Ptolemy, even at a time when fresh discoveries had proved him to be wrong, and it is a compromise between the classical geography and the epoch of the great discoveries.

In RAMUSIO's famous collection of Navigation and Voyages we find two maps drawn by Gastaldi and representing both Indian Peninsula' 2 (Pl. XVI). The Farther Indian Peninsula is so far interesting that it shows us, clearly for the first time, the great lake Lago de Chiamay in upper Burma, a curious phenomenon indeed on the maps of those days, and to which we shall return in a later chapter. Otherwise the outlines of the two Peninsula' show the characteristic form always given to them by Gastaldi.

We now have to consider a most important and epoch making map namely Tertia Pars Asia' by JACOPO GASTALDI, 1561, Pl. XVII.3 The northern mountains which hitherto have formed one range stretching east to west, is now dissolved into many ramifications, groups and systems in all directions.4 The central part of the Himalaya is still very narrow, though it consists of a double range separating India from Diserto de Camvl. Towards the west, this partition wall widens out to a regular mountain knot corresponding to the Pamirs, Badakshan, Chitral, etc. The classical names for Himalaya, Imaus, Emodus, etc., have disappeared, and in their place we find three new names, from west to east: Monte Dalangver, Monte Naugracot, and Monte Vssonte, which, for a long time to come, should reappear on nearly all European maps.5

I The map of Diego Ribero (see Periplus XLIX) is so far interesting that the Indus, with two double-headed sources, comes from the northern side of the Imaus; the sources of the Ganges are also situated north of the mountains.

2 Ramusio: Primo volume, & Seconda editione Delle Navigationi et Viaggi. Venetia, MDLIIII. The first edition was published in 155o.

3 In Nordenskiöld's Periplus, Pl. LVI.

4 According to Dr. Dahlgren a good deal of the mountain ranges and river systems on Gastaldi's map have probably been entered for a mere decorative purpose, and with the intention to fill up the blanks of the map.

5 Should Dalangver be the Dhaulagiri, and Vssonte or Usonte, the mountains of Utsang? As quoted above Tavernier says that the high mountains which are crossed by the road from Nepal to Bhutan, i. e. Tibet, were, in his days, known under the name of Naugrocot. The latter, the most important of the three, is the same as Nagarkot, the name of a city with a fort called Kangra and a shrine of Mahamaya, as it is styled in the Ain-i-Akbari. Alberuni was present at the conquest of this city by the Mohammedans. In the Tarik-i-Firishta the city is mentioned under the name of Nagrakote. Compare also Elliot's History of India, Vol. II, p. 445.

In Europe, Barros is probably the first who heard the name Nagarkot. He describes the form of the Indian peninsula, saying that the southern angle is represented by Cape Comorin, and the two northern ones by the »sources of the rivers Indus and Ganges»; these rivers come out from the mountains which Ptolemy calls Imao, and the natives Dalanguer & Nangracot, and which are so compactly crowded, as if they would conceal the sources of these two rivers. (Ramusio : Primo Volume & Seconda editione Delle Navigationi et Viaggi, Venetia MDLIIII, p. 427, c.) Both the mountains, the city and the province of Nagarkot are often mentioned in the narratives from the seventeenth century, thus for instance in : those by Edward Terry, Sir Thomas Roe, and after them by de Laet, in his De imperio Magni Mogolis etc., p. II. Father Georgi writes Nogliokot in his Alphabetum Tibetanum, p. 436,