Ancient Maps
'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]
'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]
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.'
'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?
[Apocalypse Aerie] [The Einstein Connection] [Ancient Maps] [Earth Crust Displacement] [Myths of Catastrophism] [History & Science in Myth] [Egypt; The Call of the Sphinx] [India; A Cradle for Civilization] [America; Fear of the Dark] [World Ocean; Path to Atlantis] [Precession; Warning of the Ancients] [Epilogue & Links]
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Copyright © Marc Bergvelt. 1998-2002. All Rights Reserved.
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[1] Rand & Rose Flem-Ath When the Sky Fell, Orion, 1995.
[2] Charles Berlitz, Atlantis - The Eighth Continent. Further information unavailable.
[3] Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Turnstone Books, London, 1966