'In
his book, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Charles H. Hapgood revealed
that the 1513 Piri Re'is map exhibited a knowledge of the true ice-free
portions of Antarctica. The longitudes for twenty-four sites are
accurate within one half a degree of the true positions. This standard
accuracy could not be matched until 1735 when John Harrison invented
the marine chronometer.'[1]
![](Pix/piri_reis_sm_map.jpg)
'In the mid-1960's Hapgood and his students at Keene State College
began to study a series of ancient, yet amazingly accurate, maps
of the globe. Strangely, the charts revealed areas of the world,
such as China, North America, South America, and ice-free portions
of Antarctica, long before they had been drawn by European explorers.
The ice cap in those portions of Antarctica
are presently about a mile thick.
'The
maps were accurate except for one crucial point: they depicted the
earth as it would appear if it's crust lay in a different relationship
to the earth's poles as it does now. Hapgood was convinced that
only an advanced, worldwide maritime culture that existed more than
ten thousand years ago could have created these maps.
A maritime culture that existed before Antarctica
was covered by ice.
'The Piri Re'is map yielded several more gems.
It was found that parts of the Amazon River were depicted accurately
long before that region of South America had been fully explored.
But perhaps the most incredible thing about the map was that it
had been drawn using an extremely sophisticated projection - and
'equidistance projection' that depicts the features of the earth
from one point on it's surface. This spot can center on any spot
on the earth's globe. Hapgood and his students found to their astonishment
that the original center of the Piri Re'is map lay close to the
ancient Egyptian city of Syene on the Nile.'[1]
![](Pix/pyricongif.gif)
It was from Syene that Eratosthenes, Alexandria's
librarian, calculated the circumference of the Earth. The maps were
known as Portolans - fragmentary maps used by sailors going from
one port to the next. Hapgood discovered quite a number:
'Most of these maps were of the Mediterranean
and the Black Sea. But maps of other areas survived. These included
maps of the Americas and maps of the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans.
It becomes clear that the ancient voyagers traveled from pole to
pole ... It is clear, too, that they had an instrument of navigation
for accurately determining longitudes that was far superior to anything
possessed by the peoples of ancient, medieval or modern times until
the second half of the eighteenth century.
'This evidence of a lost technology will support and give credence
to many other hypotheses that have been brought forward of a lost
civilization in remote times. Scholars have been able to dismiss
most of that evidence as mere myth, but here we have evidence that
cannot be dismissed. The evidence requires that all the other evidence
that has been brought forward in the past should be re-examined
with an open mind.'
After studying the ancient sea charts for
ten years Hapgood concluded in the preface to his book, Maps of
the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the
Ice Age;
'This book contains the story of the discovery of the first hard
evidence that advanced peoples preceded all the peoples now known
to history. In one field, ancient sea charts, it appears that accurate
information has been passed down from people to people ... We have
evidence that they were collected and studied in the great library
of Alexandria and that compilations of them were made by the geographers
who worked there. Before the catastrophe of the destruction of the
great library many of the maps must have been transferred to other
centers, chiefly, perhaps, to Constantinople, which remained a center
of learning in the Middle Ages ... Unbelievable as it may appear,
the evidence nevertheless indicates that some ancient people explored
the coasts of Antarctica when its coasts were free of ice.'
![](Pix/pyricongif.gif)
'Explored' seems, with all due respect, a
little understating it. With longitudes 'accurate within one half
a degree of the true positions' they mapped Antarctica with a precision
we couldn't emulate until the second half of the eighteenth century.
In Atlantis -- The Eighth Continent, Charles
Berlitz writes;
'Strangely accurate maps were circulating around Europe at the time
of Columbus, showing continents and shorelines that would not be
discovered in some cases for hundreds of years. These were the Portolano
maps, probably rescued from the ancient libraries and used for centuries
as navigational tools by sea captains in great secrecy in order
to protect their trade routes. But only in the last decades have
these maps been recognized for what they were.
'At the time of their last copying they demonstrated a knowledge
of the existence of, and even the coastlines of, "undiscovered"
continents; continents that evidently were mapped by a past civilization
but forgotten, except on the recopied maps, after something happened
that considerably altered the face of the world.'
Investigations by Professor Charles Hapgood, of the University of
New Hampshire, of the Piri Re'is map of the southern Atlantic and
its shores (last copied in 1513) established that spheroid trigonometry
was used to establish correct longitudinal coordinates, a process
not rediscovered until the middle of the 18th century.
'The correct coastline of Antarctica was shown
as it exists under the ice that now covers it. Another, the Oronteus
Finaeus world map (1531), not only gives the most correct longitudinal
coordinates but shows in the as yet undiscovered Antarctic continent
rivers, valleys, and coastlines in their correct position under
the glacial ice as well as the approximate location of the South
Pole.
'Further research by Professor Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea
Kings, revealed a treasury of ancient maps in the Library of Congress,
many of which show an amazing knowledge of the Earth's true geography
at a time when most people did not know that the world was round
and when cartographers were apt to fill in blank spaces on maps
with drawings of winged cherubs, monsters, or with the annotation
"here be Dragons."
'The Bauche map (1754) shows the Antarctic continent without ice,
divided into two great islands, a fact not re-established until
1958.... The King Jaime world map shows the Sahara, not as a desert,
but as a fertile land of rivers, woods, and lakes, which it once
was -- before the beginnings of chronicled history.'[2]
Advanced maritime civilizations sailing the
world ocean? An ice-free Antarctica, when geology claims the ice
to have been there many tens of thousands of years? Mapmakers at
the dawn of prehistory?
What's going on?
CONTINUE