Hydrophylacium AFRICÆ precipuum,

Anathasius Kircher (1601 – 1680) was a respected German Jesuit scholar and inventor who studied many subjects, notably geology, medicine and the Orient.  He is considered the founder of Egyptology. He was one of the first people to observe microbes under a microscope and suggested that the plague was caused by micro-organism. He was a “scientific star” of his time and has been compared to da Vinci in terms of depth and breadth of knowledge and inventiveness. In 1633, he answered a call to Rome by Pope Urban VIII and was appointed professor of mathematics, physics, and oriental languages at the Collegio Romano. He resigned in 1641 to pursue independent studies. 

The mythology of this map has its origin in a journal left by a contemporary Jesuit colleague of Kircher, Peter Páez, whose journal contains a fantasy: the Nile flows from a subterranean lake under the Mountains of the Moon. 

The map appeared in Kircher’s book, Mundus Subterraneous (The Subterranean World) Mundus subterraneus was first published in 1665. It was perhaps the earliest printed work on geophysics and vulcanology: “it must always command a high place in the literature as the first effort to describe the earth from a physical standpoint."  Kircher proposed that the earth contained a subterranean fire, diffused through volcanoes, as well as caverns with large stores of water which he called hydrophylacia  which give rise to surface water in the form of lakes and rivers. The movement of the water is described with reference to illustrations of hydraulic machinery.