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The
image of the Piri Rei's map was scanned from the frontpiece of a first
edition of Hapgood's Maps of
the Ancient Sea Kings. It is included here for non-profit
archival and research purposes only. Most
theories about ancient unknown civilizations are based on absolutely no
physical evidence, usually just hearsay and speculation. What really
would shake the basis of our knowledge of history would be an actual
artifact. This probably wouldn't be something spectacular like finding
a sunken city in the Atlantic, or armor-piercing bullets embedded in a
dinosaur skeleton. It would probably be something that only an
expert in the field would recognize as anomalous. This
artifact would be a document or tradition from the past which reveals a
deep understanding of some scientific fact recently discovered. This
could be a description of the structure and function of DNA, knowledge
of astronomy or physics which is only known to modern
science . . . or accurate maps of the earth drawn
long before the "Age of Exploration". The Piri Re'is map appears to be
just that artifact. The
Piri Re'is Map is only one of several anomalous maps drawn in the 15th
Century and earlier which appear to represent better information about
the shape of the continents than should have been known at the time.
Furthermore, this information appears to have been obtained at some
distant time in the past. Piri
Re'is, Ptolomy (2nd Century A.D.), as well as Mercator and Oronteus
Finaeus, well-known 15th Century map-makers, included the traditional
southern continent in their world maps, as did others. Antarctica was
not discovered until the 19th Century, and it was largely unexplored
until the middle of the 20th. This is just the start. Anomalous maps
also show the Behring Strait as linking Asia and America, river deltas
which appear much shorter than they do today, islands in the Aegean
which haven't been above water since the sea-level rise at the end of
the ice-age and huge glaciers covering Britian and Scandinavia. Long
dismissed as attempts by cartographers to fill in empty spaces, some of
the details of the old maps look very startling when correlated with
modern (very mainstream) knowledge of the changes in the Earths'
geography in the geologic past, particularly during the Ice Ages. The
Piri Re'is map is most interesting because of the attribution of the
source of its information, and the extraordinary detail of the coastal
outlines. The
Piri Re'is map was found in 1929 in the Imperial Palace in
Constantinople. It is painted on parchment and dated 919 A.H. (in the
Islamic calendar), which corresponds to 1513 AD. It is signed by an
admiral of the Turkish Navy named Piri Ibn Haji Memmed, also known as
Piri Re'is. According to Piri Re'is, the map had been assembled from a
set of 20 maps drawn in the time of Alexander the Great. This
map and others were analyzed by Charles H. Hapgood and his graduate
stutents. Hapgood was a historian and geographer at the University of
New Hampshire, in his book.
Only the conclusions of this book are sensational; for the most part it
is a technical monograph on the history and geography of the anomalous
maps, employing spherical trigonometry to associate map features with
actual geographic locations. The
conclusion that Hapgood reached was that a civilization with high
seafaring and mapping skills surveyed the entire earth in the ancient
past. They left maps which have been copied by hand through many
generations. The Piri Re'is map is a patchwork which has gaps (most
notably the Drake Passage between South America and Antarctica) which
can be explained as non-overlapping areas between the source maps. Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
and Hapgood's other book The
Earth's Shifting Crust, in which he advanced a theory of
polar shifts, are controversial, and earned him the scorn of offical
academia. More
evidence has appeared in recent years. Hapgood may yet be vindicated
(at least his guess as to the signficance of the anomalous maps). The
Piri Re'is map is one of the cornerstones of the growing body of
evidence for an unknown Ice Age civilization. One
striking thing about this map is the level of detail of the coasts and
interiors in South America. Although the scale is somewhat off, a long,
high mountain range is shown as the source of the rivers flowing to the
coast of South America. However,
the best-known feature in the Piri Re'is map (and other pre-modern
maps) is the Antarctic coastline. In Hapgood and others' opinions, this
represents the outline of the coast of Antarctica without glaciers. Our
modern knowledge of the coastline under the ice was obtained using
seismic sounding data from Antarctic expeditions in the 1940s and 50s.
Sonar is one way to map the coast under the Antarctic glaciers. The
other way would be to have surveyed them when they were ice-free.
According to Hapgood, who based the claim on 1949 core samples from the
Ross Sea, the last time the particular area shown in the Piri Re'is map
was free of ice was more than 6000 years ago. More recent studies show
that this may be off by a couple of orders of magnitude. In any case,
this geography should have been unknown to the ancients. If
this is correct, there are some big mysteries to explain. A
number of writers have rushed in and attempted to do just this. One
school of thought about the Piri Re'is map is the 'Atlantis in
Antarctica' thesis. The chief proponents of this are Rand and Rose
Flem-Ath, though there are others. The Flem-Aths buy into both
Hapgoods' Sea Kings
and Polar shift thesis. In the latter, Hapgood claimed that the
inclination of the Earth's axis of rotation shifted suddenly in the
year 9,500 B.C. causing Antarctica to move hundreds of miles to the
south. This transformed its climate from semi-temperate to freezing. In
contrast to the Sea Kings hypothesis, there is no evidence that
a rapid polar shift actually occured at this time and much negative
evidence that it didn't. There
is no scientific explanation for a mechanism which could cause such a
global transformation in a matter of hours without completely
destroying the crust of the planet. A planetary collision would be
required, of the sort that has not occurred since the early period of
planetary formation. If such a collision occured in 9,500 B.C., it is
fairly certain that all life on Earth would have been wiped out, which
is obviously not the case. While it is not impossible that some
instability in the planet could cause the Earth's axis to change its
inclination, this would not occur overnight. Additionally, a polar
shift would probably leave an obvious mark in the geomagnetic strata
found in sea floor cores, which is not the case. Much
has been made of Einstein's endorsement of Hapgood's polar shift
theory. In
any case, the Flem-Aths propose that this shift destroyed a
hypothetical Antarctic civilization, located somewhere in the
present-day Ross penninsula. They attempt (with mixed success) to
relate this to Plato's Atlantis.
Unfortunately, proving this would involve doing archaeology under an
ice sheet thousands of meters thick. This is an excellent example of
'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof'. While
features suggestive of advanced geographical knowledge are shown in the
map itself, the annotations and
illustrations paint a different picture. Skeptics will note that the
Piri Re'is map of the Antarctic coast, of which so much has been made,
is notated as follows:
There
are also pictures of some mythical animals in the same vicinity, of
which the text reads:
This
doesn't invalidate the startling landforms, but does indicate that
whoever wrote these notes (presumably Piri Re'is) never actually
visited Antarctica. Non-skeptics might argue that when the source map
was surveyed there could have been 1) large snakes, 2) unknown
varieties of land mammals, as well as a 3) "very hot" climate in
Antarctica, but there is no physical evidence that this has ever
been the case. This also does not explain the other fanciful
illustrations and notations on the map, including a sketch of a
red-haired headless man (with his face on his chest) in the Andes area.
This takes us out of the realm of the possible into the fantastic, a
line which Hapgood was careful not to cross, at least in Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings.
--
J.B. Hare Text on
this page is © Copyright 2001, J.B. Hare. |
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