A note in the lower right-hand part of the map states that it was designed by Philip Eckebrecht of Nuremberg and engraved by J.P. Walch in 1630. 

The present copy is a first edition with the elaborate border, which was preceded by a ‘proof’ example, without the border dedicated to the Emperor Leopold, bound into a 1629 edition of Johannes Kepler’s ‘Tabulae Rudolphinae’, now at the University of Kiel. All known surviving examples of the current map ‘must have been issued considerably later’ than Johannes Walch’s inscribed date of 1630, ‘certainly after 1658, when the Emperor Leopold, to whom the map is dedicated, came to the throne’ (Shirley 2001).

This map shows a complete central hemisphere surrounded by a pair of bifurcated hemispheres. The design harks back to Georg Braun's wall map of 1574, which also bifurcates the continents, and is tipped by the imperial double-headed eagle. To audiences of the seventeenth century, the geography depicted on this map was considered to be very current.

For a long time Eckebrecht's map was believed to be the first to show the Dutch landings in Australia. This claim is now superseded by the Cornelis Danckerts and Melchior Tavernier double-hemisphere map of the world, '

e Universelle de Tout le Monde' of 1628. 

On the North American continent, Eckebrecht records the new colonies on the east coast: 'Nova Britannia', 'Nova Anglia', New South Wales (located south of Button's or Hudson's Bay) and 'Nova Belgium'. Baffin's Bay is also marked. In the west, California is an island with the lands beyond still recognised as 'Nova Albion'.

Double-page and folding copperplate engraved bifurcated hemisphere on either side of a complete hemisphere map of the world, with an elaborate decorative border.

One of the most visually striking of all world maps, surmounted by the double-headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire. Scientifically, it is the first published map to equate one hour of time, astronomically determined, to fifteen degrees of longitude. In 1630, when it was first engraved, it was one of the first maps to show any of the Dutch 'discoveries' of Australia.

Philip Eckebrecht prepared this map for his friend, the German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler, to be used in conjunction with his new star tables as published in his 'Tabulae Rudolphinae' ('Rudolphine Tables') of 1627. Only one other example of this first issue is known, bound into a copy of the ‘Tabulae’ (1629) at the University of Kiel.

Eckebrecht’s map was designed to be used in conjunction with the updated star charts of Johannes Kepler, published in 1627 (the 'Tabulae Rudolphinae' or 'Rudolphine Tables'). Star tables, used to record the position of planets in relation to fixed stars on any given date, were previously based on a geocentric (earth-centred) solar system until Nicolaus Copernicus’s 1543 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' ('On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres') demonstrated that the earth rotates around the sun. This revelation made previous star tables inherently flawed; but in 1551 a first attempt to compile star tables based on a heliocentric (stationary sun as the centre) universe was also inaccurate. Once Kepler discovered at the dawn of the seventeenth century that the planets follow an elliptical orbit, a new era of star charting began. 

Scientifically, it is the first published map to 'equate one hour of time, astronomically determined, to fifteen degrees of longitude' (Smithsonian). In 1630, when it was first engraved, it was one of the first maps to show any of the Dutch discoveries of Australia.

Eckebrecht's Decorative World Map