Iggeret Orchot Olam.

Possibly the first geographical book written in Hebrew, the first edition of which was issued in Ferrara in 1524. This edition was published by Rabbi Israel Landau, son of the Nodah ben Yehuda, and was the first one to be published with engravings. It also includes material added by the publisher Israel Landau. This version with Landau's notes became the standard for further editions of the book.

This is a cosmographic and geographic work based upon Farissol's original research as well as the works of Christian and Arab geographers, especially Bergomas' Supplementum, Amerigo's Cosmographia, and Fracanzano da Montalboddo's Paesi novamente retrovati e nova mundo da Alberico Vesputio riorentino intitulato. Each of the work's thirty chapters deals with a certain geographical area or subject, many cosmological and historical matters are also discussed.
The work contains accounts of the newly discovered parts of the world, such as America and the new Portuguese sea route India, it also discusses the Ten Tribes of Israel and the various Jewish communities around the world. One chapter dedicated on America and includes descriptions of the Native Americans, their sexual practices, social organisation, health, lack of property, their wealth in precious gems and metals and the rich American wildlife. Farissol also used a combination of textual evidence with geographic and climatic evidence to determine the location of the Garden of Eden.

Beautiful engravings by Anton Balzer (Prague, 1711-1807) portray a sea-going ship next to a whale, the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark and a deep-sea diver. Balzer, a hereditary Bohemian school burin engraver, studied in Vienna under Jacob Schmutzer and travelled extensively in Europe to gather subject material for his engravings.

The work was translated into Latin by Bodleian Hebraist Thomas Hyde and published under the title Tractatus Itinerum Mundi (Oxford, 1691).