Ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy

Sidney, Australia, November 12, 2007—The ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy could never have imagined that he'd end up here. A stolen 15th-century map based on the scholar's famous work Geographia, a groundbreaking compilation of world geography written in the second century A.D., was found recently in Sydney. The map and several others were originally torn out of books in Spain's national library by a researcher with access to restricted areas—or someone posing as such a researcher, investigators say. Several of the other documents have been recovered in New York and Argentina and are already in Spanish hands, according to wire reports.

National Geographic