Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings

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(excerpts)

 

Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings

 

 

This book gives compelling evidence that there existed advanced civilizations prior to any that we are now aware of. Scholars have long dismissed legends and myths of such civilizations as mere story-telling and embellishment by our ancestors. Dr. Charles Hapgood studied what he considered copies of ancient maps and came to some very startling conclusions. In 1929, a map was found, painted on parchment, and dated in the month of Murharrem in the Muslim calendar year 919, which is 1513 by the Christian calendar. This map was signed with the name Piri Ibri Haji Memmed, a Turkish admiral ("Re'is") and became known as the Piri Re'is map.

 

The map aroused interest because it appeared to be one of the earliest maps of the Americas. Examination showed that this map differed significantly from all other maps of America drawn in the 16th century in that it showed South America and Africa in correct relative longitudes. This was remarkable because navigators in the 16th century had no means of finding longitude except by guesswork. Another detail excited researchers as well. In one of the legends inscribed on the map, Piri Re'is stated that he based the western part of it on a map drawn by Christopher Columbus. This was very exciting, as for several centuries geographers had been trying without success to find a "lost map of Columbus" supposed to have been drawn by him in the West Indies.

 

Piri Re'is made several interesting statements about his source maps. He used about twenty, he said, and stated that several had been drawn in the time of Alexander the Great. Scholars who studied the map in the 1930s could prove neither statement, but it appears now that both statements were true. After a time, scholars lost interest in the map and it was not accepted as a map by Columbus. No more was heard of the map until 1956, when a Turkish naval officer brought a copy of the map to the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office as a gift. The map was referred to a cartographer on the staff, M. I. Walters.

 

Walters happened to show the map to a friend, Captain Arlington H. Mallery, a student of old maps and a breaker of new ground in borderline regions of archaeology. Mallery took the map home to study, and returned with some surprising comments. He made the statement that the map, in his opinion, showed bays and islands off the Antarctic coast of Queen Maud Land now under the ice cap. This would imply that somebody mapped the coast before the ice cap had appeared. This statement was too radical to be taken seriously by most professional geographers, but Walters felt Mallery might be right.

 

When our investigation started my students and I were amateurs together. My only advantage over them was that I had had more experience in scientific investigations; their advantage over me was that they knew even less and therefore had no biases to overcome. At the very beginning I had an idea - a bias, if you like - that might have doomed our voyage of discovery before it started. If this map was a copy of some very ancient map that had somehow survived in Constantinople to fall into the hands of the Turks, as I believed, then there ought to be very little resemblance between this map and the maps that circulated in Europe in the Middle Ages. I could not see how this map could be both an ancient map (recopied) and a medieval one. Therefore, when one of my students said this map resembled the navigation charts of the Middle Ages, at first I was not much interested. Fortunately for me, I kept my opinions to myself, and encouraged the students to begin the investigation along that line. [1]

 

Neither the medieval navigators nor the known Greek geographers could have drawn them. The Arabs, famous for their scientific achievements of the Middle Ages, apparently could not have drawn them either. Their maps are less accurate than Ptolemy's. The evidence points to the origin of the portolanos in a culture with a higher level of technology than was obtained in medieval or ancient times.

 

 

As for the lines that we see intersecting each other, to form lozenges, or triangles, or squares: these same lines, I wish to say, dating from ancient Greek times, and going back to Timosthenes, or even earlier, were probably never drawn ... to give ... distances to the navigator. The makers of the portolanos preserved this method, that they borrowed from the ancient Greeks or others, more probably and rather to facilitate the task of drawing a map, rather than to guide the navigator with such divisions. [3]

In other words, the portolano design was an excellent design to guide a map maker either in constructing an original map or in copying one.

 

[Hapgood and his students concluded] the Greek geographers of Alexandria had in front of them source maps that had been drawn without the Eratosthenian error. This suggested that the peoples who originated the maps possessed a more advanced science than that of the Greeks. It was obvious that the original maker of the map had observed their latitudes and longitudes extremely well. It also became apparent that those who originally copied the Piri Re'is map had used a different length for a degree of latitude than for a degree of longitude. In other words, the geographers who designed the square portolan grid for which Hapgood and his students discovered a trigonometric solution had apparently applied their projections to maps that had originally been drawn with another projection.

 

The conclusions Hapgood drew are history shattering in their implications. The evidence presented by the maps he and his students studied indicate the existence of a civilization in remote times, well before the rise of any known civilization. In geodesy, nautical science and map making, it was more advanced than any civilization before the 18th century. In fact, it was not until the 19th century that our own civilization explored the Arctic and Antarctic, and the bottom of the Atlantic ocean. These ancient maps indicate that the makers did all these things.