Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1996
Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven
as fine examples of engraving. It is rare for a piece of cartography to appear in the capacity of a trustworthy historical source. The earliest maps were based on hearsay or imagination. As the technical sciences advanced, such haphazard information gradually gave way to authentic data obtained by scientific methods of measurement, calculation and depiction. The depictions, illustrations and heraldic devices on maps are also of importance to scientific historians. They can shed light on contemporary surveying techniques, townscapes, military engagements, or costumes, or even the roads and the mail coaches of the day. Hungarian cartography has a lengthy history, even by European standards. The first known work is a map of Hungary by Scribe Lázár, the scholarly secretary to Tamás Bakócz, Archbishop of Esztergom. This appeared in Ingolstadt in 1528. The golden age of cartography on Hungarian soil ensued in the 17th and 18th centuries, when most cartographers were military engineers, serving military purposes during the Austro-Turkish wars. However, some information of a postal character also appears. Thematic cartography in the narrow sense appeared in the 18th century, and that is when the first postal maps were drawn. Thematic postal maps show topographical and geographical features as a context in which the thematic content - information about postal and communications services - can be placed. They make trustworthy sources for details about postal services, telegraph and telephone lines, and radio and television broadcasting. This is information essential to modern research into postal and telecommunications history. The map collection at the Postal Museum holds several items of value to cartography in general and to postal and telecommunications history. They include maps of Hungary and Transylvania by János Zsámboky or Sambucus (1531-1584), and a map of Hungary by Gerard Mercator (1512-1594). These were based on earlier maps by Lázár, Lázius and Honterus, but they preserve, for instance, a rich store of Hungarian place names, and served for several decades as the basis for other cartographers. The 1698 military map of Leopold Rosenfeld is the first piece of cartography to show the post roads in Hungary. It is also the first to feature a post hom as an illustration. A new period in Hungarian cartography opened with the map of Hungary by Johann Christoph Müller (1673-1721). This was based on accurate measurements on site and provided the basis for foreign publishers for a century. One item of great importance to postal history is the world postal atlas by Franz Johann Joseph von Reilly (1766-1820). This appeared in Vienna in 1799, and devotes three of the 40 plates to Hungary and Transylvania. The postal map by Ferenc Karacs (1770-1838) is one of the earliest by the famous 19th- century Hungarian cartographers. The next two major items are the atlas of Hungary by Demeter Görög, Sámuel Kerekes and József Márton, published in Vienna in 1812, and the map of Hungary by János Lipszky. Both of these are important from the postal point of view, because they show the postal routes and stations. The former closed the era of hand- drawn maps of Hungarian counties. It continued to be used in public administration until the end of the century. The latter surpassed everything before it in cartographic terms, and remains a source used up to the present day. The catalogue of the collection in the Hungarian section of this book lists the maps chronologically from the 16th century to 1867, when the separate Royal Hungarian Post 313
