Chanak.Cairo, Survey Department Egypt, 1915 Colour-lithographed map (79 x 62.5 cm), printed in black, brown, red, blue and green. Mounted on contemporary cloth, with the key on the back (printed on or printed and pasted onto). Folded.

The finest contemporary map of the Çanakkale sector of the Gallipoli Campaign, the site of the dreaded "Narrows" of the Dardanelles where allied naval forces made their ill-fated attempt to "force the straits" towards taking Istanbul, at a scale of 1:20,000. Drafted in Cairo under the direction of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) at the Arab Bureau's Intelligence Office, based on a recently captured Ottoman map. The main map image is in black with land contours in brown, waterways in blue, and vegetation in green, with soundings printed in the strait and a grid of parallels and meridians in red (with a note that they are based on a magnetic north). The larger squares (each 5 x 5 smaller squares) are numbered (in a single sequence for the six maps in the series) and the 25 smaller squares designated by letters a-z (without e) - printed only in square 33, so that any 600 x 600 metre square on the map can be specified with coordinates.In the early days of World War I, the British and allied forces sought to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the conflict by taking Constantinople, by way of the Dardanelles. The Gallipoli Campaign (17 February 1915 to 9 January 1916) involved a force of 490,000 British, Indian, Australian, New Zealander and French troops making various landings upon the Gallipoli Peninsula that strategically guarded the mouth of the Dardanelles. The 325,000 Ottoman defenders, backed by German forces, successfully repelled these raids in one of the bloodiest military conflicts in world history.From the outset, the Allies were hampered by a lack of accurate maps of the Gallipoli Peninsula and the adjacent Asian shore of the Dardanelles. They eventually succeeded in capturing a complete six-part set of excellent, newly published Ottoman surveys showing the battle theatre in its entirety. These maps were rushed to the map department of the Intelligence Office (later the famed "Arab Bureau") in Cairo, where they were translated, enlarged and improved by a team headed by Lieutenant T. E. Lawrence, later known as "Lawrence of Arabia". These maps were printed by the Survey Department, Egypt, as a series of six interconnecting maps, although each map was designed to act as a stand-alone work complete in and of itself (a geographic key to all six maps is present on the back of the present map).Overall clean and bright, with some very light stains in the upper-left quadrant and light wear at some fold vertices.l Not in WorldCat.