This article is about the mythical King Atlas. For other meanings of Atlas see Atlas (disambiguation)

King Atlas was a mythical King of Mauretania, in Libya. He was said to be a wise philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, who supposedly made the first celestial globe. It was this Atlas that Gerardus Mercator was paying tribute to when he first used the name "Atlas" to describe a book of maps (see Atlas (cartography)). Mercator included a depiction of the King on the title-page of his publication of "Atlas, Sive Cosmographicae Meditationes De Fabrica Mundi ..." (Atlas, or Description of the Universe) (Duisburg, 1585-1595), which was published posthumously.

External Links

On the origin of the term "atlas" for a book of maps