Piri Reis Map 1513
In 1929, a map was discovered in an old imperial palace in Constantinople, which worried many. It was painted on parchment and dated 919 according to the Muslim calendar, which corresponded to 1513 according to the Christian chronology. It bore the signature of Piri ibn Haji Mamed, admiral of the Turkish fleet, now known as Piri Reis.
Lithospheric disaster and ancient maps of Antarctica. At one time, Piri Reis made other interesting statements about the sources from which he drew information. He used about twenty maps, mainly from the time of Alexander the Great, as well as maps drawn on a rigorous mathematical basis, scientists who studied his map, discovered in the 1930s, could not trust these confessions. But now their truth is being revealed.
After some time, public attention to the map faded, and scientists rejected it as an analogue of the “Columbus map”. It was not heard of her until 1956, when, as a result of happy accidents, interest in her reignited in Washington. A Turkish naval officer donated maps to the US Marine Hydrographic Office.
The map was then sent to MI Walters, the cartographer of the naval headquarters.
It so happened that Walters passed the map to his friend, a specialist in ancient cartography and the initiator of new scientific directions at the interface with archeology. It was Captain Arlington H. Mallery. After a distinguished career as an engineer, navigator, archaeologist and writer, he devoted a number of years to the study of ancient maps, especially the Viking maps of North America and Greenland. Taking the map home, he came to curious conclusions. In his opinion, its southern part reflected the bays and islands of the Antarctic coast, or rather the Queen Maud Land, now hidden under the ice. Thus, someone has already mapped these areas when they were free of ice.
These claims were so incredible that they could not be taken seriously by most professional geographers, although Walters himself felt that Mallery must be right.
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Neither medieval masters nor famous ancient Greek geographers could draw such maps. Their characteristics indicate their origin from a culture with a higher level of technology than that reached in the Middle Ages or ancient times.
According to Piri Reis himself, it was a map of the “seven seas” and included Africa and Asia, as well as the northern part in addition to the surviving piece.
It was found that the position of some points on the Piri Reis map was very accurate, while others were not strictly fixed. Gradually, we realized the reason for such inaccuracies. It turned out that this map was made up of smaller maps of individual territories (possibly drawn at different times and by different people), and errors accumulated as it was created.
Component maps that came from distant antiquity were more accurate and reliable than later images of the earth's surface. And this speaks of the decline of science, from ancient times to modern history.
The longitude and latitude of the coastline is determined fairly accurately. This is also true for the North Atlantic islands, with the exception of Madeira. The accuracy of the longitude of the African coast, where it is greatest, can be explained by our assumption about the center and radius of the projection, but with some corrections.
From the portolan with the modern coordinate grid, it can be seen that the coasts separated by the Atlantic have approximately correct corresponding longitude values relative to the center of the projection on the meridian of Alexandria. This leads to the belief that the first compiler must have determined the correct longitude for all space from the Alexandrian meridian to Brazil itself.
It is also important that most of the islands are located at true longitude.
The exact location of the islands suggests that they were already on the ancient map used by Piri Reis.
Piri Reis, in all likelihood, had ancient maps at his disposal while in Constantinople, and it is possible that some of them reached the West long before him.
In 1204, the Venetian fleet, on a crusade to the Holy Land, attacked and captured Constantinople. And for 60 years after that, Italian merchants had the opportunity to redraw maps from the Byzantine collection.
We have reason to believe that a good map of the St. Lawrence River was available to Europeans even before the voyage of Columbus in 1492. Even the islands near the mouth are marked on it. The compiler of this map, Martin Beheim, placed it on the globe, which he created shortly before Columbus returned from his maiden voyage.
Historian Las Casas testified that Columbus had a world map, which he showed to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, after which they were convinced that the idea was not hopeless.
A number of 16th century world maps show the Antarctic continent. As will be seen from what follows, Gerhard Mercator believed in its existence. Comparing all the maps, one or two main groups can be distinguished, depending on different projections. In accordance with them, Antarctica was copied or re-copied only with some amendments by various cartographers.
Antarctica Mercator Map
Gerhard Kremer, better known as Mercator, is considered the most prominent cartographer of the 16th century. There is even a tendency to lead the beginning of scientific cartography on his behalf. And yet there was no cartographer more interested in antiquity, more tireless in the search for ancient maps, or more respectful of the study of bygone eras.
If Mercator did not believe in Antarctica, it would be understandable why he did not include the map of A. Finaus in his Atlas. He was not publishing a book of fiction. But we have good reason to believe that he admitted the likelihood of the existence of this continent: Antarctica was drawn on the maps by him personally. One of her images appeared on folio 9 in the 1569 Atlas.
The projection on the mercator map of Antarctica is exactly the one named after him. The meridians run parallel from pole to pole, and this, as already noted, greatly exaggerates the size of the polar regions.
Earlier, in 1538, Mercator drew a world map, and also with Antarctica. Its similarity with the work of A. Finaus is striking, but there are also significant differences. Mercator's Antarctic circle is within the continent, like Phinaus, but not at the same distance from the pole. In other words, it looks like Mercator has changed the scale.
On the map of Finaus, as has already been shown, the so-called “circulus antarcticus” was mistakenly presented as the 80th parallel of the original source. Mercator has violated the original scale, so we cannot reconstruct the latitude grid on this map, as we have done elsewhere. The value of the longitudes turned out to be extremely accurate.
One gets the impression that Mercator constantly used the ancient primary sources that were available to him. What happened to them later, we do not know, but you can find their influence, at least in those cases when Mercator lacked information from contemporary travelers, and he depended on ancient materials.
As for the 1569 map of South America, a number of interesting details emerge here.
First of all, in relation to the northern coast, it is quite clear that ancient maps dominated Mercator, as well as materials from contemporary expeditions. He incorrectly placed the Amazon in relation to the equator, as was the case on the Piri Reis map. But the course of the river is shown correctly with a number of bends - a meander. Marajo Island, correctly tied to the equator on the Piri Reis projection, is here confused with Trinidad Island at the Orinoco Estuary. And Trinidad is thus doubled in size. The southeastern coast of South America, from the Tropic of Capricorn to Cape Horn, is very poorly drawn, apparently from the reports of sailors, while the west coast is distorted in shape.
And at the same time, on the map of 1538, that is, several years earlier, Mercator has already shown more correct outlines of the western coast of South America. What was the reason here? It can be assumed that in his first map he was based on ancient sources, while in 1569 he used materials from travelers of his time, who did not know how to correctly determine the longitude, but only showed the general direction of the coast.
Aranteus Finaus world map, 1532
Other medieval and Renaissance portolans have been found that could have shown Antarctica. A number of such maps have been discovered because, as already mentioned, many cartographers of the 15th and 16th centuries believed in the existence of the southern continent.
“During the Christmas holidays in late 1959, Charles Hapgood was exploring Antarctica in the Library of Congress Reference Room in Washington DC. For several weeks in a row, he worked there on hundreds of medieval maps.
“I discovered / writes he / a lot of amazing things that I did not even know to find, and several maps depicting the southern continent. And then one day I turned the page and was dumbfounded. My gaze fell on the Southern Hemisphere of the world map drawn by Oronteus Phineus in 1531, and I realized that before me was a genuine, real map of Antarctica!
The general outline of the continent is surprisingly similar to that depicted on modern maps. Almost in place, almost in the center of the continent, was the South Pole. The mountain ranges that fringed the shores resembled the numerous ridges discovered in recent years, enough not to be considered an accidental result of the imagination of a cartographer. These ridges have been identified, some onshore, some in the distance. Rivers flowed from many of them to the sea, very naturally and convincingly fitting into the folds of the relief. This, of course, assumed that the coast was free of ice at the time the map was drawn. The central part of the continent on the map is free of rivers and mountains, which suggests the presence of an ice cap there."
“Charles Hapgood taught history of science at Keene College, New Hampshire, USA. He was neither a geologist nor a specialist in the history of the ancient world.
“By examining this map of Antarctica on a grid of parallels drawn by Aranteus Finaus, we found that he extended the Antarctic Peninsula too far north - up to 15 °. At first, it was thought that he simply moved the entire continent in the direction of South America. Further work, however, showed that the Antarctic coastline was abnormally stretched in all directions, in some places even reaching the tropics. The whole problem, therefore, was on a scale. Using some lengthy map, the compiler was forced to stretch the Antarctic Peninsula to Cape Horn, almost completely displacing the Drake Passage. Moreover, this mistake was made much earlier, since we found the same distortion on all Antarctic maps of that period, including the Piri Reis portolan. It is likely that this mistake was made in antiquity on the original map,skipping a significant part of the coast of South America: there was no free space for it."
The map in question shows the absence of glaciers at a considerable distance from the coast. These are Queen Maud Land, Enderby Land, Wilkes Land, Victoria Land (east coast of the Ross Sea), Mary Byrd Land. There was a significant lack of points with coinciding coordinates (with the modern map) for the western coast of the Ross Sea, Ellsworth Land, and Edith Ronne Land.
Comparing the map of Aranteus Finaus with the map of subglacial topography of Antarctica compiled by services of various countries during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1959, explains some of the shortcomings of medieval labor, and also sheds light on the extent of glaciation at the time when the original map was created.
Expeditions of the IGY, using seismic sounding, recreated the shape of the earth's surface hidden by the current ice cap. And it turned out that there was no west coast at the Ross Sea at all; moreover, the continent's rocky bed runs below ocean level just between the Ross and Weddell Seas. If the ice melts, the same Ellsworth Land will become not dry land, but oceanic shallow water.
If the western coast of the Ross Sea and the coast of Ellsworth Land are fictitious land, then the absence of certain physical and geographical characteristics of this sector on the map of A. Finaus becomes understandable. But it seems that ice cover, at least in West Antarctica, may have already existed at the time of mapping, since the inland waterways connecting the Ross, Weddell, Amundsen Seas are not shown - everything was already frozen.
Of course, it should be remembered that millennia must have elapsed between the early and late schematic maps of various parts of Antarctica. Therefore, it is impossible to conclude with certainty that there was a time when East Antarctica was rich in ice, and in the West it was absent. The maps of East Antarctica could have been drawn millennia after other maps.
Boucher, a French geographer of the 18th century, left for posterity a map that shows the continent at a time when there was no ice at all … If you get rid of obvious errors in the orientation of Antarctica in relation to other land masses, then it is easy to imagine that this map shows rivers connecting the Ross, Weddell, Bellingshausen Seas.
While studying the mysteries of ancient maps, Charles Hapgood came up with the idea that the accepted theory and timing of the ice ages may be different. The hypothesis of the pole shift was born. Not gradual, but intermittent.
Albert Einstein was among the first to realize this when he decided to write the foreword to a book written by Hapgood in 1953, several years before the latter began researching the Piri Reis map:
“I often receive correspondence from people who want to know my opinion on their unpublished ideas. It is clear that these ideas are very rarely of scientific value. However, the very first message I received from Mr. Hapgood literally electrified me. His idea is original, very simple and, if confirmed, will be of great importance for everything connected with the history of the Earth's surface.
These "ideas", formulated in Hapgood's 1953 book, are essentially a global geological theory that gracefully explains how and why large swathes of Antarctica remained ice-free until 4000 BC, as well as many others. anomalies in earth science. In short, his arguments boil down to the following:
1. Antarctica was not always covered with ice and was once much warmer than today
2. It was warmer because at that time it was not physically at the South Pole, but was located about 2000 miles to the north. This "took her out of the Arctic Circle and placed her in a zone of temperate or cold temperate climates."
3. The continent has moved and took its current position within the Arctic Circle as a result of the so-called "displacement of the earth's crust." This mechanism, which should not be confused with plate tectonics or continental drift, is associated with periodic movements of the lithosphere, the outer crust of the Earth, as a whole "around the soft inner body, just as the orange peel could move around the pulp if the connection between them weakened."
4. In the course of such a "journey" to the south, Antarctica gradually cooled down, and on it, little by little, but inevitably, the ice cap grew for several thousand years until it acquired its present shape.
Einstein summed up Hapgood's discovery like this:
“In the polar region, there is a constant accumulation of ice, which is placed asymmetrically around the pole. The rotation of the Earth acts on these asymmetric masses, creating a centrifugal moment that is transferred to the rigid earth's crust. When the magnitude of such a moment exceeds a certain critical value, it causes a movement of the earth's crust relative to the part of the Earth's body located inside …"
Charles Hapgood:
“The only ice age that has an adequate explanation is the current glaciation in Antarctica. It is perfectly explained. It is quite obvious that it exists simply because Antarctica is at the pole, and nothing else. This fact does not depend on variations in the input of solar heat, nor from galactic dust, nor from volcanism, nor from currents flowing under the crust, and has nothing to do with land rise or ocean currents. This suggests the conclusion that the best theory to explain the Ice Age is the one that says: because there was a pole in this place. Thus, it is easy to explain the presence in the past of glaciation in India and Africa, although in our time these places are in the tropics. The origin of any continental-scale glaciation can be explained in the same way."
What evidence is there that Antarctica was not always an ice continent?
In 1949, on one of Sir Byrd's Antarctic expeditions, sediment samples were taken from the bottom of the Ross Sea. It was produced through drilling. Dr. Jack Hoof of the University of Illinois took three cores to study the evolution of climate in Antarctica. They were taken to the Carnegie Institute of Washington, DC, where they used a new dating method developed by nuclear physicist Dr. W. D. Uri.
This method is called ionic for short. At the same time, they operate with three radioactive elements contained in sea water in certain proportions - uranium, ionium, radium. However, the decay period is different for them, and this means that when they fall into the bottom sediment and the moisture turnover stops, the amount of these radioactive elements decreases, but not to the same extent. Therefore, when receiving and examining bottom samples in the laboratory, one can determine their age by changing the proportions of these elements in marine sediments.
The nature of bottom sediments varies greatly depending on the climatic conditions that existed at the time of their formation. If they were carried out by rivers and deposited in the sea, then they turn out to be well sorted, and the better, the further they fall from the river mouth. If they are ripped off the earth's surface by a glacier and carried out into the sea by an iceberg, then their character corresponds to the coarse material. If the river has a seasonal cycle, flowing only in summer, most likely from melting glaciers in the inland regions, and freezing every winter, then precipitation will form in layers, like annual rings on trees.
All of these types of sediment have been found in the bottom cores of the Ross Sea. Most striking was the presence of a series of layers formed from well-sorted sediments brought into the sea by rivers from the ice-free land. As you can see from the cores, over the past million years, Antarctica has had at least three epochs of temperate climates, when the shores of the Ross Sea were supposed to be ice-free.
The timing of the end of the last warm period in the Ross Sea, as determined by Dr. Uri, was of great importance to us. All three cores indicated that the warming ended about 6,000 years ago, or in the fourth millennium BC. This was when glacial sediments began to accumulate at the bottom of the Ross Sea during the Ice Age near us. Kern argues that this was preceded by a longer warming.
Thus, it turns out that iceless Antarctica was already in the existence of ancient civilizations, and not hundreds of thousands of years ago, as was commonly believed.
Alfred Veneger, the creator of the theory of glaciation, apparently also knew about the mechanism of the "ice clock", but did not dare to disclose his knowledge. Even during the lifetime of the genius, official science mocked him to his heart's content. Everybody hounded him, only the very lazy one did not "kick" him. He became cautious and suddenly became addicted to travel to Greenland, where he eventually died tragically.
This is, in brief, the history of the emergence of the theory of lithospheric catastrophes, which went to the people under the name of "pole shift".
But many conclusions follow from this. Since there are old maps showing Antarctica without icing, it can be assumed that there is a developed civilization capable of making such a mapping just before this glaciation. But where did this civilization go then?
The fact is that the displacement of the earth's crust will cause a movement of water in the oceans, similar to that which occurs in a sharply moved plate. It is this theory that can explain the biblical Flood. And not every civilization can withstand such an event. After this, the survivors are able to slide into barbarism and lose many civilizational achievements. The same is good for understanding where Atlantis disappeared. She hasn't gone anywhere. After the waves destroyed her well-established life, she began to become covered with ice. Now we know it as Antarctica. Archaeological surveys under ice more than a kilometer thick are hardly possible. Some of the knowledge of this civilization has survived to our time in the form of maps, redrawn from more ancient astronomical concepts and crafts. It is not for nothing that many peoples have legends about people who came from across the sea and taught them crafts,writing and much more.
Such is the story. So far, there is no more compelling evidence of its correctness. But the existing ones no longer allow dismissing it.
Sergey Kamshilin
