Medieval world maps, Islamic as well as European, illustrated the world as a circle. Coming to signify orbis terrarum (“the circle of lands,”) this circle was divided into the known continents, regions, or climate zones. In the early Ottoman atlases, as was in their European counterparts, a double-sphered depiction of the world gradually replaced the single circle. The typus orbis terrarum, or the küre-i arz, does not simply epitomize the venture to represent the three dimensional earth on a two-dimensional page, or reveal the new world: it illuminates changing approaches to geographical knowledge in the early modern Ottoman Empire. Atlas, as a genre, entered the Ottoman intellectual world in the seventeenth century with an adaptation-translation of Atlas Minor into Ottoman by Katip Çelebi, called Levamiu'n-Nur fi Tercümeti Atlas Minor. It was followed by Behram ed-Dime?ki’s Ottoman adaptation of Atlas Maior, Muhtasar-u Nusret'l-Islami ve's-surur fi tercumeti Atlas Mayor, and Müteferrika’s publication of the first Ottoman atlas based on these manuscripts, constituting the first atlases in the Ottoman Empire. In his Levamiu'n-Nur fi Tercümeti Atlas Minor, Katip Çelebi explained that he pictured the whole earth in two circles (“co?rafiyay? iki dâyirede tasvîr”) for it was vital to study “the whole” in sciences. Representing the whole world in two circles was indeed exactly what typus orbis terrarum meant: it was an embodiment of the earth in its entirety. Katip Çelebi further elaborated in the same section that he presented the description of all the features and pictures of the land/earth in his geography, emphasizing the rising association of a holistic representation of the world with geography itself. This paper aims to demonstrate the transformation in Ottoman intellectual thinking as ways of describing and representing the world changed with the atlas. Atlas was synonomous with geography in the Ottoman intellectual world before it came to be defined as a collection of maps. Straddling between knowledge and science as an Ottoman ‘ilm, geography was defined repeatedly from the seventeenth to nineteenth century in these atlases. Organized around continents and centered on the earth, the early Ottoman atlases opened with descriptions and representations of küre-i arz. The modifications and changes —as well as continuities— embodied through these “circles of land” in the early atlases open up a window to the process of the transformation of geographical knowledge in the early modern Ottoman Empire.