Abstract
A belief that the spots on the Moon are reflections of Earth's lands and seas can be traced from classical Greece via medieval Europe and the Middle East to 19th-century Persia and perhaps to the early years of this century in European folklore. Cartographers could have used the vista thus afforded them to fill in otherwise unknown regions on mappaemundi. It is not certain that they did so, but several examples of lunar influence may be noted. The most promising is a depiction of southern Africa by Ibn Said (c. 1250) which closely resembles the lunar eastern maria reversed by reflection. The imagined reflection of the Earth in the lunar mirror may also account for the reversed T-O maps in several manuscripts of Isidore's De Natura Rerum and two reversed Macrobian mappaemundi. An otherwise meaningless text associated with Aristotle may be interpreted by means of the lunar mirror hypothesis to indicate that lunar librations were observed in classical Greece some 1900 years before their 'discovery' by Galileo.
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