A "groundbreaking" 16th century map credited with giving America its name has gone on display at Christie's.
The map, the oldest printed map of the New World, is one of only four surviving examples and is expected to raise up to £800,000 at auction.
As well as using the word America for the first time, after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who argued that the land discovered by Columbus in 1492 was a new continent, the map is also the first printed portrayal of the Earth as a globe.
It was discovered by chance two years ago when a newspaper picture caught the attention of a European collector as he drank his coffee one morning, and he recalled seeing something similar in his own collection.
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Described as "truly groundbreaking" by Christie's, where it will be sold in June, the 1507 map by Martin Waldseemullar was the first to distinguish the continents of North and South America and show the Pacific Ocean.
"This is one of the most exciting discoveries of my career, and represents the pinnacle in the history of map making," said Tom Lamb, director of Christie's book and manuscript department in London.
Although history records that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492, he was convinced the land mass to the West was Asia.
It was Vespucci, who sailed there a few years later, who put forward the then revolutionary argument that it was a new continent altogether.
In 1505 Rene II, the Duke of Lorraine, gathered a group of scholars at the Monastery of Saint Die des Vosges near Strasbourg, led by Waldseemuller, to create a new map of the world.
Until then, the conception of the world had been based on the knowledge of the Ancient Greeks but the scholars worked from a French translation of Vespucci's voyages that Rene received from Lisbon earlier that year.
In 1507, the scholars published a work called Cosmographiae Introductio, which argued the existence of a new land mass to the West, and followed it within a month with the map showing it for the first time and clearly marking it "America".
The map will go under the hammer as part of a sale of Important Maps, Atlases and Globes on June 8.