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  The Piri Reis Map seems to contain surprising collateral evidence in

  support of the thesis of a geologically recent glaciation of parts of

  Antarctica following a sudden southward displacement of the earth’s

  crust. Moreover since such a map could only have been drawn prior to

  4000 BC, its implications for the history of human civilization are

  staggering. Prior to 4000 BC there are supposed to have been no

  civilizations at all.

  At some risk of over-simplification, the academic consensus is broadly:

  • Civilization first developed in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East.

  15 Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, 1966 ed., p. 189.

  16 Ibid., p. 187.

  17 Ibid., p. 189.

  18 Einstein's foreword to Earth's Shifting Crust, p. 1

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  • This development began after 4000 BC, and culminated in the

  emergence of the earliest true civilizations (Sumer and Egypt) around

  3000 BC, soon followed by the Indus Valley and China.

  • About 1500 years later, civilization took off spontaneously and

  independently in the Americas.

  • Since 3000 BC in the Old World (and about 1500 BC in the New)

  civilization has steadily ‘evolved’ in the direction of ever more refined,

  complex and productive forms.

  • In consequence, and particularly by comparison with ourselves, all

  ancient civilizations (and all their works) are to be understood as

  essentially primitive (the Sumerian astronomers regarded the heavens

  with unscientific awe, and even the pyramids of Egypt were built by

  ‘technological primitives’).

  The evidence of the Piri Reis Map appears to contradict all this.

  Piri Reis and his sources

  In his day, Piri Reis was a well-known figure; his historical identity is

  firmly established. An admiral in the navy of the Ottoman Turks, he was

  involved, often on the winning side, in numerous sea battles around the

  mid-sixteenth century. He was, in addition, considered an expert on the

  lands of the Mediterranean, and was the author of a famous sailing book,

  the Kitabi Bahriye, which provided a comprehensive description of the

  coasts, harbours, currents, shallows, landing places, bays and straits of

  the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas. Despite this illustrious career he fell

  foul of his masters and was beheaded in AD 1554 or 1555.19

  The source maps Piri Reis used to draw up his 1513 map were in all

  probability lodged originally in the Imperial Library at Constantinople, to

  which the admiral is known to have enjoyed privileged access. Those

  sources (which may have been transferred or copied from even more

  ancient centres of learning) no longer exist, or, at any rate, have not been

  found. It was, however, in the library of the old Imperial Palace at

  Constantinople that the Piri Reis Map was rediscovered, painted on a

  gazelle skin and rolled up on a dusty shelf, as recently as 1929.20

  Legacy of a lost civilization?

  As the baffled Ohlmeyer admitted in his letter to Hapgood in 1960, the

  Piri Reis Map depicts the subglacial topography, the true profile of Queen

  Maud Land Antarctica beneath the ice. This profile remained completely

  19 Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, pp. 209-11.

  20 Ibid., p. 1.

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  hidden from view from 4000 BC (when the advancing ice sheet covered it)

  until it was revealed again as a result of the comprehensive seismic

  survey of Queen Maud Land carried out during 1949 by a joint BritishSwedish scientific reconnaissance team.21

  If Piri Reis had been the only cartographer with access to such

  anomalous information, it would be wrong to place any great weight on

  his map. At the most one might say, ‘Perhaps it is significant but, then

  again, perhaps it is just a coincidence.’ However, the Turkish admiral was

  by no means alone in the possession of seemingly impossible and

  inexplicable geographical knowledge. It would be futile to speculate

  further than Hapgood has already done as to what ‘underground stream’

  could have carried and preserved such knowledge through the ages,

  transmitting fragments of it from culture to culture and from epoch to

  epoch. Whatever the mechanism, the fact is that a number of other

  cartographers seem to have been privy to the same curious secrets.

  Is it possible that all these map-makers could have partaken, perhaps

  unknowingly, in the bountiful scientific legacy of a vanished civilization?

  21 Ibid., pp. 76-7 and 231-2.

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  Chapter 2

  Rivers in the Southern Continent

  In the Christmas recess of 1959-60 Charles Hapgood was looking for

  Antarctica in the Reference Room of the Library of Congress, Washington

  DC. For several consecutive weeks he worked there, lost in the search,

  surrounded by literally hundreds of medieval maps and charts.

  I found [he reported] many fascinating things I had not expected to find, and a

  number of charts showing the southern continent. Then, one day, I turned a page

  and sat transfixed. As my eyes fell upon the southern hemisphere of a world map

  drawn by Oronteus Finaeus in 1531, I had the instant conviction that I had found

  here a truly authentic map of the real Antarctica.

  The general shape of the continent was startlingly like the outline of the continent

  on our modern maps. The position of the South Pole, nearly in the center of the

  continent, seemed about right. The mountain ranges that skirted the coasts

  suggested the numerous ranges that have been discovered in Antarctica in recent

  years. It was obvious, too, that this was no slapdash creation of somebody’s

  imagination. The mountain ranges were individualized, some definitely coastal

  and some not. From most of them rivers were shown flowing into the sea,

  following in every case what looked like very natural and very convincing drainage

  patterns. This suggested, of course, that the coasts may have been ice-free when

  the original map was drawn. The deep interior, however, was free entirely of rivers

  and mountains, suggesting that the ice might have been present there.1

  Closer investigation of the Oronteus Finaeus Map by Hapgood, and by Dr

  Richard Strachan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, confirmed

  the following:

  1 It had been copied and compiled from several earlier source maps

  drawn up according to a number of different projections.2

  2 It did indeed show non-glacial conditions in coastal regions of

  Antarctica, notably Queen Maud Land, Enderby Land, Wilkes Land,

  Victoria Land (the east coast of the Ross Sea), and Marie Byrd Land.3

  3 As in the case of the Piri Reis Map, the general profile of the terrain,

  and the visible physical features, matched closely seismic survey maps

  of the subglacial land surfaces of Antarctica.4

  The Oronteus Finaeus Map, Hapgood concluded, appeared to document

  ‘the surprising proposition that Antarctica was visited and perhaps

  1 Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (henceforth Maps), p. 79.

  2 Ibid., p. 233.

 
; 3 Ibid., p. 89.

  4 Ibid., p. 90. These maps were made in 1958, International Geophysical Year, by survey

  teams from several different nations.

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  settled by men when it was largely if not entirely non-glacial. It goes

  without saying that this implies a very great antiquity ... [Indeed] the

  Oronteus Finaeus Map takes the civilization of the original map-makers

  back to a time contemporary with the end of the last Ice Age in the

  northern hemisphere.’5

  The Oronteus Finaeus map, showing Antarctica with ice-free coasts,

  mountains and rivers.

  Ross Sea

  Further evidence in support of this view arises from the manner in which

  the Ross Sea was shown by Oronteus Finaeus. Where today great glaciers

  like the Beardmore and the Scott disgorge themselves into the sea, the

  1531 map shows estuaries, broad inlets and indications of rivers. The

  unmistakable implication of these features is that there was no ice on the

  Ross Sea or its coasts when the source maps used by Oronteus Finaeus

  were made: ‘There also had to be a considerable hinterland free of ice to

  feed the rivers. At the present time all these coasts and their hinterlands

  are deeply buried in the mile-thick ice-cap, while on the Ross Sea itself

  there is a floating ice-shelf hundreds of feet thick.’6

  The Ross Sea evidence provides strong corroboration for the notion that

  Antarctica must have been mapped by some unknown civilization during

  the extensively ice-free period which ended around 4000 BC. This is

  5 Ibid., p. 149.

  6 Ibid., p. 93-6.

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  emphasized by the coring tubes used, in 1949, by one of the Byrd

  Antarctic Expeditions to take samples of sediment from the bottom of the

  Ross Sea. The sediments showed numerous clearly demarcated layers of

  stratification reflecting different environmental conditions in different

  epochs: ‘coarse glacial marine’, ‘medium glacial marine’, ‘fine glacial

  marine’, and so on. The most surprising discovery, however, ‘was that a

  number of the layers were formed of fine-grained, well-assorted

  sediments, such as are brought down to the sea by rivers flowing from

  temperate (that is, ice-free) lands ...’7

  Using the ionium-dating method developed by Dr W. D. Urry (which

  makes use of three different radioactive elements found in sea water8),

  researchers at the Carnegie Institute in Washington DC were able to

  establish beyond any reasonable doubt that great rivers carrying finegrained well-assorted sediments had indeed flowed in Antarctica until

  about 6000 years ago, as the Oronteus Finaeus Map showed. It was only

  after that date, around 4000 BC, ‘that the glacial kind of sediment began

  to be deposited on the Ross Sea bottom ... The cores indicate that warm

  conditions had prevailed for a long period before that.’9

  Mercator and Buache

  The Piri Reis and Oronteus Finaeus Maps therefore provide us with a

  glimpse of Antarctica as no cartographer in historical times could

  possibly have seen it. On their own, of course, these two pieces of

  evidence should not be sufficient to persuade us that we might be gazing

  at the fingerprints of a lost civilization. Can three, or four, or six such

  maps, however, be dismissed with equal justification?

  7 Ibid., p. 97.

  8 For a detailed description of the process see Maps, P. 96.

  9 Ibid., page 98.

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  The Mercator map, showing Antarctica’s mountains and

  rivers covered by ice.

  Is it safe, or reasonable, for example, for us to continue to ignore the

  historical implications of some of the maps made by the sixteenthcentury’s most famous cartographer: Gerard Kremer, otherwise known as

  Mercator? Best remembered for the Mercator projection, still used on

  most world maps today, this enigmatic individual (who paid an

  unexplained visit to the Great Pyramid of Egypt in 156310) was reportedly

  ‘indefatigable in searching out ... the learning of long ago’, and spent

  many years diligently accumulating a vast and eclectic reference library of

  ancient source maps.11

  Significantly, Mercator included the Oronteus Finaeus map in his Atlas

  of 1569 and also depicted the Antarctic on several he himself drew in the

  same year. Identifiable parts of the then undiscovered southern continent

  on these maps are Cape Dart and Cape Herlacher in Marie Byrd Land, the

  Amundsen Sea, Thurston Island in Ellsworth Land, the Fletcher Islands in

  the Bellinghausen Sea, Alexander I Island, the Antarctic (Palmer)

  Peninsula, the Weddell Sea, Cape Norvegia, the Regula Range in Queen

  Maud Land (as islands), the Muhlig-Hoffman Mountains (as islands), the

  Prince Harald Coast, the Shirase Glacier as an estuary on Prince Harald

  Coast, Padda Island in Lutzow-Holm Bay, and the Prince Olaf Coast in

  Enderby Land. ‘In some cases these features are more distinctly

  recognisable than on the Oronteus Finaeus Map,’ observed Hapgood,

  ‘and it seems clear, in general, that Mercator had at his disposal source

  10 He left his graffito there. See Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, Harper &

  Row Publishers, New York, p. 38, 285.

  11 Maps, p. 102.

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  maps other than those used by Oronteus Finaeus.’12

  And not only Mercator.

  Philippe Buache, the eighteenth-century French geographer, was also

  able to publish a map of Antarctica long before the southern continent

  was officially ‘discovered’. And the extraordinary feature of Buache’s map

  is that it seems to have been based on source maps made earlier,

  perhaps thousands of years earlier, than those used by Oronteus Finaeus

  and Mercator. What Buache gives us is an eerily precise representation of

  Antarctica as it must have looked when there was no ice on it at all.13 His

  map reveals the subglacial topography of the entire continent, which even

  we did not have full knowledge of until 1958, International Geophysical

  Year, when a comprehensive seismic survey was carried out.

  That survey only confirmed what Buache had already proclaimed when

  he published his map of Antarctica in 1737. Basing his cartography on

  ancient sources now lost, the French academician depicted a clear

  waterway across the southern continent dividing it into two principal

  landmasses lying east and west of the line now marked by the TransAntarctic Mountains.

  Such a waterway, connecting the Ross, Weddell and Bellinghausen Seas,

  would indeed exist if Antarctica were free of ice. As the 1958 IGY Survey

  shows, the continent (which appears on modern maps as one continuous

  landmass) consists of an archipelago of large islands with mile-thick ice

  packed between them and rising above sea level.

  The epoch of the map-makers

  As we have seen, many orthodox geologists believe that the last time any

  waterway existed in these ice-filled basins was millions of years ago.

  From the scholarly point of
view, however, it is equally orthodox to affirm

  that no human beings had evolved in those remote times, let alone

  human beings capable of accurately mapping the landmasses of the

  Antarctic. The big problem raised by the Buache/IGY evidence is that

  those landmasses do seem to have been mapped when they were free of

  ice. This confronts scholars with two mutually contradictory propositions.

  12 Ibid., pp. 103-4.

  13 Ibid., p. 93.

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  The Buache map, with landmasses which show Antarctica very much

  as it would have looked before it became covered by ice.

  Which one is correct?

  If we are to go along with orthodox geologists and accept that millions

  of years have indeed elapsed since Antarctica was last completely free of

  ice, then all the evidence of human evolution, painstakingly accumulated

  by distinguished scientists from Darwin on, must be wrong. It seems

  inconceivable that this could be the case: the fossil record makes it

  abundantly clear that only the unevolved ancestors of humanity existed

  millions of years ago—low-browed knuckle-dragging hominids incapable

  of advanced intellectual tasks like map-making.

  Are we therefore to assume the intervention of alien cartographers in

  orbiting spaceships to explain the existence of sophisticated maps of an

  ice-free Antarctica? Or shall we think again about the implications of

  Hapgood’s theory of earth-crust displacement which allows the southern

  continent to have been in the ice-free condition depicted by Buache as

  little as 15,000 years ago?14

  14 For a fuller discussion of the evidence behind this theory see Part VIII of this book and

  Hapgood's Earth's Shifting Crust.

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  Above left and right Redrawings of the Mercator and Oronteus

  Finaeus maps showing the progressive glaciation of Antarctica. Below

  left Redrawing of the Buache map. Below right The subglacial

  topography of Antarctica, according to modern seismic surveys.

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  An early nineteenth-century Russian map showing that the existence

  of Antarctica was at that time unknown. The continent was