Back in September 2013 I visited Dubai for one day during a layover when I was flying from Alaska back to South Africa. I was fortunate enough to be able to sleep on the flight from New York to Dubai, so when I arrived in Dubai I took a quick shower at the hotel then headed out to explore for a few hours. I spent some time at the Dubai Museum. The museum is located in a fort that is the oldest building in Dubai and has several interesting exhibits. I’ll blog a little more about my visit to the museum later this week.

For now, I want to share this picture of an interesting map that was displayed in a little nook in one part of the museum. As I was walking through the museum, the map caught my eye, so I took a picture of it. The map is titled “Map of Arabia in 1570 by Abraham Ortelius”. I was intrigued by the map as I thought that 1570 was quite early for such a detailed map to have been produced for the region. When I did some googling after the museum visit, I discovered that the map comes from a book known as the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), which is considered to be the world’s first modern atlas. This atlas was compiled by Abraham Ortelius, a Flemish cartographer and geographer. I’ll have to do some reading on Ortelius– he sounds like he was a very interesting person. According to Wikipedia, he was apparently one of the first people (the first person?) to propose the theory of continental drift… long before Alfred Wegener!