The earliest map of the Holy Land published by Abraham Ortelius was drawn after Tilemann Stella, or Tilemann Stoll, a German schol ar whose academic and practical interests spanned the fields of mathematics, engineering, astronomy, and cartography. His best-known cartographic work was a general map of Germany published in 1560, but it was his 1557 map of the Holy Land that inspired Ortelius to re-engrave his work for the first edition of the 'Theatrum Orbis Terrarum'.

The map shows the entire Holy Land in great detail, stretching from the Nile Delta up to the southern border of Syria, where Ortelius has made the strange error of locating Leontopolis, an ancient Egyptian city that was actually situated on the banks of the Nile. The image extends far enough south to track the peregrinations of the Israelites in full, as they descended into the Sinai Peninsula during their 40 years of exile from the Promised Land. Their route is marked out with double-dashed lines, with each of the encampments labelled along the way.

In both the Holy Land and Egypt, a large number of towns and cities are represented pictorially, as is relief, and identified by name; the seas, rivers, and waterways are also depicted in detail, with the Dead Sea formed in a crescent shape. The territories inhabited by the Twelve Tribes of Israel are labelled, and the provincial names assigned to various regions under the Roman Empire are also given. In the waters of the Mediterranean there appear several galleons and a fabulous sea monster, set above which is a cartouche housing a descriptive note briefly explaining the history of the Holy Land. In the lower right-hand corner, the map's title is housed within an even more elaborate cartouche flanked by pipe- playing satyrs and the heads of lions, which surmounts the scale bar.

The map was first published in the 1570 edition of Ortelius's 'Theatrum Orbis Terrarum'. The present map is printed from a new plate - first published in 1579 - dating from the Latin edition of 1584.