In 1929, the director of the National Museum in Istanbul, Dr. Khalil Ethem, during the work on the creation of a museum in the Topkapi Sultan's Palace, dismantled the library of Byzantine emperors in the old palace of the sultans. On one of the dusty shelves, his attention was drawn to a map that had been lying around for some unknown time, made on the skin of a gazelle and rolled into a tube. It depicted the western coast of Africa, the southern coast of South America and the northern coast of Antarctica. Most surprisingly, the coastal edge of Queen Maud Land south of the 70th parallel was ice-free. At this point, a mountain range was drawn on the map.
The name of the compiler Edham was well known - the admiral of the Ottoman Navy and the cartographer Piri Reis, who lived in the first half of the 16th century. A graphological examination of the marginal notes confirmed that they were made by the hand of the admiral. The authenticity of the map was not in doubt.
The map was made from pieces of gazelle skin with dimensions 90 × 63 cm, 86 × 60 cm, 90 × 65 cm, 85 × 60 cm, 87 × 63 cm and 86 × 62 cm. The map is currently in the library of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul (Turkey), however, as a rule, she does not participate in the public exposition.
This geographical map of the world was created in 1513 in Constantinople (Ottoman Empire) by a Turkish admiral and a great lover of cartography Piri Reis (full name - Haji Muhiddin Piri ibn Haji Mehmed). The map shows parts of the western coast of Europe and North Africa with high precision, the map also easily recognizes the coast of Brazil and the eastern tip of South America. The map contains various islands in the Atlantic Ocean, including the Azores and Canary Islands (like the mythical island of Antilia). Many believe that the map contains elements of the southern continent, which is considered proof of the awareness of ancient cartographers about the existence of Antarctica.
The map immediately attracted attention, as it was one of the first maps of America and the only map of the 16th century where the South American continent is located correctly relative to the African one. In 1953, a Turkish naval officer sent a copy of the Piri Reis map to the US Navy Hydrographic Bureau. A certain I. Walters became interested in the map. In order to evaluate the map, Walters, being the chief engineer of the bureau, turned to the expert of ancient maps, Arlington H. Mullery, who had previously worked with Walters, for help. Mullery took a long time to discover what kind of cartographic projection was being used on the map. To check the accuracy of the map, he made a grid and superimposed the Piri Reis map on the world map: the map was absolutely accurate. After his work, he stated that the only way to create a map of this accuracy was aerial photography. Also,to build a map of Piri Reis, one must have knowledge of spherical trigonometry, which was developed and described only in the 18th century.
Terra Australis on Mercator Map
The Piri Reis map is one of the first known maps to show the coasts of both South and North America with sufficient accuracy, although it was compiled only 21 years after the travels of Columbus. The map is a compilation work, in the production of which a variety of sources were used, including very ancient ones. In particular, Piri Reis directly indicates that the oldest maps of the inhabited world used by him belong to the era of Alexander the Great (IV century BC), perhaps the author used some materials from the deceased library of Alexandria. The remnants of ancient knowledge were indeed more accessible than the Ottoman Empire at that time, since the territory of Egypt at the time of the map was part of the Ottoman Empire. On the other hand, in descriptions referring to recently discovered South American lands,there are references to the testimonies of Portuguese navigators - contemporaries of Piri Reis. There are also references to the use of some "Columbus Map"; apparently, this does not mean a map made by Columbus himself or his associates, but an older map used by Columbus.
American researcher Professor Hapgood claims that at least part of the Piri Reis map is composed of copies of maps of unknown origin, striking in their accuracy. The creators of the originals, according to Hapgood, had an accurate idea of the shape and dimensions of the Earth (the Earth's equator was measured with an accuracy of about 100 km, without this, the construction of such an accurate map would have been impossible) and used original cartographic projections close to those of began to be used from the XVIII-XIX centuries. To create such maps, the mathematical apparatus of spherical trigonometry, unknown to Piri-reis, had to be used. While working with these cards, Piri-Reis made mistakes based on his level of knowledge. Hapgood, developing Mullery's methods with the help of his students, proposed a sequence of transformations,which not only lead it to modern cartographic projections (Hapgood used the Mercator projection), but also eliminate the mistakes of the map creator, which makes it possible to objectively assess the quality of the source maps. Until now, the methods used by Hapgood, described in detail in his books, have not been refuted by anyone.
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The conclusions drawn from the results of processing the map were unexpected. The fact is that at the time of the creation of the map, marine navigation did not have the means of any accurate determination of longitude. If the latitude of a place was determined by goniometric instruments from the stars with an accuracy of a degree of arc and higher, then an exact standard of time (chronometer) was needed to measure longitude, which appeared only two centuries later, so that when measuring longitude, errors of several degrees were easily made (hundreds of miles). The original maps, built on measurements of that time, demonstrate just such a picture - the accuracy of longitudes there is significantly lower than latitudes. But on the Piri Reis map, after Hapgood's transformations, the accuracy of longitudes was at the same level as latitudes. The most accurate is the image of the Mediterranean region,but for remote areas, the coordinates of the control points identified by Hapgood and his students are very accurate.
The map of Piri Reis depicts, and, according to a number of researchers, quite accurately, real-life, but unknown at the time of its creation, geographical objects. In particular, in the depths of the South American continent, the Andes are depicted, before the discovery of which there were several decades left, the islands shown off the coast of South America are well identified with the Falklands, also discovered only in the second half of the 16th century.
The greatest amount of controversy is the presence in the lower part of the Piri Reis map of land, which is identified by the aforementioned Mullery and Hapgood with the coast of Antarctica, officially discovered only in 1820. However, there is no information about any detailed studies of Antarctica and South America in the XIV-XV centuries, the results of which could form the basis of the map. At the same time, the hypothetical coast of Antarctica on the map is connected with the coast of South America, that is, there is no Drake Passage (which in reality is almost a thousand kilometers wide).
At present, all the arguments both in favor of the opinion about the depiction of Antarctica on the Piri Reis map and against it are equally not convincing enough, primarily due to the great antiquity of this work and the lack of sufficient documentary evidence. All arguments and disputes are based only on common sense and assumptions.
The most mysterious is that the coast depicted on the map, according to Hapgood, exactly corresponds to the coast of the under-ice part of the continent, the shape of which became known only in the 1950s, after large-scale seismographic studies. This judgment is supported by the conclusions of the American military, who investigated the subglacial relief of Antarctica in the late 1950s, who, when asked by Professor Hapgood regarding the correspondence between the image on the Piri Reis map and the real coast of the mainland, gave an answer, which reported the following:
“The statement that the lower part of the map depicts the coast of Princess Martha, Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, and the Palmer Peninsula is reasonable. We believe that this conclusion is the most logical and, in all likelihood, the correct interpretation of the map.
At the bottom of the map, the geographic features show a very marked resemblance to the seismic scans of the 1959 Swedish-British Antarctic Expedition of the actual geological topography under the glacier there. This indicates that the coastline was mapped before it was covered with ice. The glacier in this region is now about a mile thick.
We have no idea how the data on this map might correlate with the estimated level of geographical knowledge in 1513."
If we take as a basis the version that the map actually depicts the ice-free coast of Antarctica, then, as noted in Olmeer's letter above, it could only be mapped in the pre-glacial period, since the glacier protrudes far beyond the land and noticeably changes the outlines of the continent. According to modern concepts, the ice sheet on the surface of Antarctica was formed several million years ago and since then the continent has never been completely free of ice. But the age of a human being as a biological species does not exceed hundreds of thousands of years, of human civilization - several millennia. Even if we accept the hypothesis of some prehistoric "cartographers" who lived millions of years ago, it remains unclear how the results of their labors got to people, because the most ancient known civilizations (Egyptian and Sumerian) appeared no more than 6000 years ago.
The absence of Drake Passage looks strange. It, in principle, could be explained by the presence of a glacier connecting Antarctica with South America and subsequently melted, but such a glacier could exist only in one of the ice ages, when the Antarctic coast should also have been under the glacier, which contradicts the image of the Antarctic shores without a glacier.
Professor C. Hapgood suggested that in reality the age of the Antarctic ice does not exceed several thousand years, and the manufacturer of the initial maps of the Antarctic coast was a certain prehistoric navigator who achieved great success in navigation and cartography, who explored the entire planet from pole to pole, and subsequently completely disappeared and did not leave any material evidence about himself, except for cartographic materials. It is the activity of these hypothetical prehistoric cartographers that explains the appearance of sources for the Piri Reis map, a number of other early (medieval and Renaissance) maps, which, presumably, depicts Antarctica in different stages of glaciation. They are also declared the creators of the portolans, known in the Middle Ages and later, - nautical charts used for coastal navigation.
Comparison of azimuth projection and Piri Reis map
Hapgood explains the distortions on the map by the fact that the originals were made in a projection unknown to Piri-Reis and his predecessors. The contours from the Piri Reis map (left picture) and the azimuthal projection of the real globe (right picture) show very similar distortions. Today we know nothing about the principles of cartographic projection of ancient sources. If such sources really fell into the hands of Piri Reis, then the system of their cartographic projection Piri Reis obviously could not understand correctly and redrawn "as is" on his map, which caused distortions.
To explain the inconsistency of the glaciation time of Antarctica with modern scientific data, Hapgood proposes a pole shift theory. According to his assumptions, in relatively close prehistoric times, a shift of the earth's crust occurred, during which the continents shifted by 2000-3000 km, Antarctica took a position at the pole, after which its total icing began.
Hapgood offers several possible explanations for the connection on the Piri Reis map of the coast of Antarctica and South America:
In the southern part of the South American continent, the Piri Reis map shows signs of duplication of the same area. Perhaps, when the map was created by Piri Reis himself or, perhaps, by the author of one of the source maps, fragments of ancient maps depicting the same area were misunderstood as neighboring, as a result, a section of the South American coast with a length of up to 1500-2000 km was duplicated. Thus, South America was "stretched" southward just the width of the Drake Passage, or even more.
The coasts could indeed be united by a glacier if the source from which this part of the map was copied falls on a cold snap, while the coast of Antarctica is depicted on a map of a warm period.
Hapgood noted that many old maps of the then unknown Antarctica are depicted noticeably larger than in reality. He considered the source of the error to be the incorrect identification of the parallels on the original map - the artificial transfer of the Antarctic Circle to the 80th parallel. Accordingly, the size of Antarctica was exaggerated, and on the unified map it "rested" on South America. Other errors are possible, leading to the same result.
Piri Reis, among other sources of his work, noted that his map was based on a certain map of Christopher Columbus (apparently referring to the map available to Christopher Columbus), which is why many geographers have been unsuccessfully looking for the "lost map of Columbus" for several centuries … This was done, according to his notes, when Christopher was in the West Indies. After reading the news of the discovery of the map in The Illustrated London News, US Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson contacted the US Ambassador to Turkey (then Charles Sherrill) and asked for a search for the original map of Columbus, which he believed may have been in Turkey. In turn, the Turkish government complied with Stimson's request, but the search was unsuccessful, and no source of the Piri Reis map was found.
The Piri Reis map is depicted on the official banknotes of Turkey: banknotes of 10 million old Turkish lira (banknotes of 1999-2005, out of circulation), as well as banknotes of 10 new lira (banknotes of 2005-2009) …