The myths of the Indians of ancient America tell of the "white gods" who came from overseas and taught people about culture. Who were they? Where, on what continent to look for their traces?
Archaeological work is being carried out in different parts of the world. Only one part of the world has been ignored by scientists. This is Antarctica. Perhaps its ice hides the secret of an ancient culture that arose long before the Egyptian and Sumerian cultures and was destroyed by a climatic catastrophe? Hypotheses of some scientists say that the origins of all civilizations are hidden under the ice of Antarctica. Fleeing from glaciation, its native inhabitants fled to other parts of the world, enlightening the savages who lived there, teaching them the ability to build pyramids, teaching them in astronomy and navigation. Was Antarctica really “the mother of all cities on earth” and her fate was reflected in the legend of Atlantis?
Admiral Reis makes a discovery
The measured course of history, imperceptible for people, was broken in 1929. It was then that it was discovered that the “river of life” could have had a different channel, left to it thousands of years ago. His traces were noticed by archivists who worked in the old Istanbul library in the Topkari Palace.
Scientists did not come there at all to shake the foundations of history, to disrupt the passage of time. They were engaged in the inventory of manuscripts and incunabula. Their catalog also mentioned a nautical chart, carefully drawn several centuries ago.
As soon as a point was put in the line that marked the map, the minute ripple subsided. Again, nothing disturbed the measured course of time. The map was described, but not worthy of attention, although the lines on its yellowed leaf slightly revealed a strange phenomenon.
Another thirty years passed. The strangeness that marked the sheets of the map finally struck the attentive reader in the eye. It was Charles Hapgood, professor of history at Keene College in New Hampshire, who made a sensational discovery. And that same old map helped him. It was once used by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis. For 1513, the map was miraculously drawn. It showed the entire Atlantic coast of South America, rendered very accurately. And also … The lower part of the map was bordered by the southern continent - Antarctica, discovered by the Russian navigators M. Lazarev and F. Bellingshausen only in 1820.
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Hapgood and his colleague couldn't help but wonder. The contours of Antarctica on the old map exactly followed the outlines of its original coastline. We could even see the details hidden from us under the ice: the channels of ancient rivers and their mouths. As if the cartographer Piri Reis could have known what Antarctica looked like before its last glaciation, which happened about six thousand years ago!
Only one reasonable explanation could be given by a scientist to an amazing phenomenon. Like the scriptwriters of medieval monasteries who carried the words of Aristotle or Plato to the descendants, the admiral's cartographer was a master of calligraphy, who knew how to accurately copy a document that fell into his hands. Admiral Reis lived in Istanbul, that is, in Constantinople, where, since ancient times, books were kept, copied and transmitted - the chronicles of many lived lives and solved mysteries.
Perhaps in the secret archive of the Byzantine emperors there were the best maps of that time, hidden from both Arabs and Latins. They were taken to the capital of the empire from the most remote provinces. In turn, those maps could have been secretly kept for centuries somewhere in Phenicia, Carthage or Egypt. Admiral Reis, the unwitting heir of the ancient naval commanders, could become the owner of one of them.
This conclusion is logical. But, on the whole, who six thousand years ago could have known Antarctica? If the voyages of the Phoenicians - the best sailors of antiquity - to the shores of America seem incredible to us, then who will we send to explore the Antarctic waters 3000 years before them? Who will map the badges of distant lands with the general illiteracy that reigned in the Neolithic? Who will calculate the latitude and mark the longitude? Who will understand the sailing directions of the starry sky? In other words, the find was akin to a shaking of the earth that threatened to overturn the usual historical constructions. The shadow of forgotten ancestors on the horizon of the past flashed the ghost of an unknown extinct civilization.
Perhaps too early, before the time, it developed and flourished, protected by the ocean from the barbarian tribes, like China - by its wall, until the change in climate deprived her of her birth roots. Fleeing from the ice, the people who created it sailed north to disappear into the waves.
Only a few made it to land. From now on, remembering the cataclysm, the heirs of the culture destroyed by the natural disaster settled in the hottest countries, among the deserts and steppes - in Egypt, Mesopotamia, America, where ice will never move towards them.
But did these fugitives really exist? From what links is the past of mankind woven? Aren't there any voids there, carved just to the standards of the "white gods"?
Historians and fabulists
Homo sapiens has inhabited the planet for many tens of thousands of years. The last 10,000 years of its history have been especially significant.
14,000 years ago, when the ice age ended, people learned how to gouge tree trunks and make canoes in which they started fishing.
Another 4000 years passed. People began to plow the land, cultivate plants, tame animals, and make pottery. However, their life remained unhurried. There is no hint that the numerous tribes huddling along the edges of forests or along the banks of rivers will soon have developed state systems, legislation, bureaucracy, vast armies, writing, science and fine arts. Similar tribes in Asia or South America have survived in the Stone Age to this day.
Everything changes around 3000 BC. e. Immediately in several areas of the planet, lying on the sea coast, the first civilizations are being born: in Sumer, Egypt, Mohenjo-Daro - as if the seeds of these cultures were brought here by the sea.
“There are historians. They collect the past bit by bit. And there are fabulists. Not having a penchant for painstaking, rough work, they think up whole nations with one impulse of thought. From a handful of ice - not even a handful of dust - civilizations are created. There are historians and there are fabulists. Their paths will never converge. Mr. Hapgood, unfortunately, went the other way, not befitting his colleagues in the shop,”- such was the general opinion.
If it were the will of the opponents, the Reis map would melt as well - like a piece of ice taken from the Vostok station. However, inappropriate discoveries were made after Mr. Hapgood, strayed from colleagues. There were too many flaws in the links of the chain.
So, a few years ago, the Russian archaeologist Svetlana Balabanova, examining an Egyptian mummy (its age was about 4000 years), found traces of … cocaine in her hair. Unthinkable!
Coca bushes grow only in South America - in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru. How could cocaine get into the land of the pharaohs so long before the voyage of Columbus? Did the ancient seafarers, perhaps the same Phoenicians, reach the shores of America? Or did someone else's ships rush to America or Africa?
The appearance of Tyutchev to the peoples
The history of human culture begins with a creative take-off. It was embodied by the monuments of Egypt. The pyramids and the Sphinx are a well-passed exam for the right to be called a civilized people. However, these monuments have long raised questions to which answers have not yet been found. Aren't their drawings copied from old "cheat sheets" left by an unknown people? In pseudo-scientific circles, enlighteners - aliens or Atlanteans - are sent to the "unreasonable Egyptians". Such "hypotheses" and "sensations" seem to be idle chatter. But when archaeologists echo the myth-makers …
As you know, the largest pyramids of Egypt, like the Sphinx, were built during the reign of the pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty - Cheops, Chephren, Mykerinus (about 2700-2300 BC). However, in 1991, a group of American researchers - geologists, geophysicists, and Egyptologists - raised doubts about the seemingly established fact long ago. Exploring the cracks in the pedestal on which the Sphinx, a gigantic lion with the face of Pharaoh Khafre, sits, they stated that the stone could crack so only in a humid climate. However, the last time the climate in Egypt was humid was about 12,000 years ago. Was the Sphinx, or at least its pedestal, built thousands of years earlier than anticipated? Who built them? “If we can prove that the first developed civilization appeared on Earth much earlier, then this discovery will completely change our views on history,how Einstein's theory changed physics,”says the American Egyptologist John E. West.
For the sake of curiosity, West suggested to the American criminologist Frank Domingo - by occupation, he restores the appearance of a person on the basis of his remains - to compare the image of the Sphinx with the appearance of Pharaoh Khafre. His conclusion debunked the legend: there was nothing in common between the ancient king and the stone figure. Meanwhile, doubt crept into the age of the pyramids. So, radiocarbon analysis (although this method does not always give accurate results) showed that the pyramids began to be erected around 2900 BC. e. - two hundred years earlier than it was thought. In principle, this date fits into the official historiography, but sometimes two hundred years is a huge period in history.
In the year 1802 Australia and South Africa were the remote outskirts of civilization, where they traveled for months. Now in a few hours you can transfer from Moscow or London to Sydney. So in 2900 BC. e. Egypt was not at all the same country as in 2700. Egypt has just reunited after years of war. Local residents did not yet know how to build tall buildings and buried their kings on a small "scale".
The life of pastoralists and farmers - the main population of Egypt in that era - is easy to imagine: fields, herds, seeds, the annual floods of the Nile - a continuous series of concerns. What kind of whim has suddenly dawned on these people? Why did they start building Cyclopean buildings? Why did the aborigines of Australia or the Bushmen of Africa, like most other peoples, never come to such an absurd idea and did not begin to erect stone buildings almost 150 meters high and weighing six million tons? Then why and how a strange idea could arise among the inhabitants of a desert country? It would be more logical to allow its appearance among the mountaineers living surrounded by stone.
"How did the architects of the pharaohs know," the Belgian architect Robert Boval fights against the ghosts of the pyramids, "that the angle of inclination of the pyramid cannot exceed 52 °, otherwise its wall will collapse?" For Beauval, there is no doubt that the architecture of the "grand style" could not arise from literally nothing.
It does not happen that today "they build shacks, and tomorrow skyscrapers." Knowledge is accumulated gradually. Discoveries are made in a timely manner. Bedouin nomads have no need to invent a steam locomotive. The peasants are not concerned with comprehending the laws of architecture. “You won't find Helikon in syrts, laurel won't bloom on ice floes, Chukchi don't have Anakreon, Tyutchev won't come to Zyryans,” wrote A. Fet, mocking those who believe that civilization can arise from scratch.
All known history shows the opposite. The treasures of culture - alphabet letters, manuscripts and scrolls, stone tablets of laws, secrets of crafts accumulated by a certain cultured people - are scattered among its neighbors, assimilated by alien nomads or invading invaders, lost without counting, but transmitted from the Greeks to the Romans, from the Romans - barbarians (Germans in the north and Arabs in the south), from the first Rome to the second, from the second Rome to the third … And only the Egyptians - like magicians ready to get a flock of rabbits out of their hat - extract from a piece of Nile land all the secrets of science, culture and state construction!
According to Beauval, the plan for the construction of the pyramids of Cheops, Chephren and Mikerin originated about 10,000 years ago, since their arrangement echoes the location of the three stars in the Orion belt about 10,500 years ago. By the way, this constellation played an important role in Egyptian mythology. Here lived the god Osiris, according to the legends of the Egyptians, who put things in order in their country since time immemorial.
Let's take a breath and take a break from unexpected discoveries, but for now let's move to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean - to South America. However, weirdness haunts us here too.
What kind of clock did the meganthropes build?
In the Bolivian Andes, near Lake Titicaca, at an altitude of 4000 meters, lies a modest village inhabited by Indians. These places are dull and unsightly. Stone blocks and carefully polished columns complete the impression. When they first got here, the conquistadors froze in horror. It seems that giants lived here … In response to questions, the Indians silently shook their heads. No, this was not built by the Incas.
Catholic priests explained what they saw in their own way: only the devil could move huge stones and heap them on top of each other. Half a century ago, the French cosmologist Sora suggested that "meganthropes" (giants) lived here with a height of four to five meters. Their high growth was due to mutations caused by cosmic rays. However, cosmologists and Catholics were wrong. All the giant buildings were made by ordinary people.
Once upon a time, one of the largest cities of ancient America, Tiahuanaco, stood here. Its name means "City chosen by the gods". The most famous monument of the city is the Solar Gate. They face east, and every time, on the day of the spring solstice, the rising sun is shown right in the middle of the gate. The gate can be called a huge sundial. When were they "brought in"?
According to historians, this happened around 300-800 AD. e. The city itself was probably founded around 200 BC. e. The solar gate is bordered by two side walls. It was reasonable to assume that their conspicuous points could also mean something in the ancient solar calendar, for example, to mark the day of the summer or winter solstice. However, our expectations were in vain. If the Solar Gate was an ancient observatory, then their architects were unable to accurately arrange the walls. How can you explain their mistake?
Perhaps they did not know how to implement their plans and make calculations correctly? It is strange to say this about people who perfectly polished blocks of many tons and adjusted them so that the buildings seem to be monolithic.
In 1995, the Scottish journalist and sociologist Graham Hancock released the cult book "Traces of the Gods" (it has sold over 10 million copies). In it, he offered his explanation for the given fact. True, it contradicts the conclusions of historical science, but the more popular is its version among readers.
So: what if the Tiahuanaco Temple was built much earlier than we think? Or was it built according to plans drawn in prehistoric times? After all, 7,500 years ago, as astronomers calculated, the side walls of the Solar Gate accurately indicated the position of the Sun on the day of the summer and winter solstices.
In this case, the conclusion is inevitable that somewhere on our planet almost ten thousand years ago there was a developed civilization. She has reached a high technical level. However, for some reason, its representatives had to leave their homeland. The surviving fugitives passed on their knowledge to the primitive inhabitants of Egypt and America. A single source nourished both these cultures, because sometimes the realities of the life of the ancient Egyptians and Indians are so similar.
In the myths of the latter, memories of "the time that came before the time" gleam. So, to the question of the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortez about who erected the pyramids of Teotihuacan - a city northeast of Mexico City, plundered and burned about 750 AD. e., - the local Indians said that it was not their people who built the pyramids, but they were built long before them. Likewise, some of the texts of Ancient Egypt speak of the "old time", which was "long before the beginning of time."
Traces of the distant past are found in Central America and on the Nile. The mysterious talent of ancient engineers and sculptors is confusing. Their "student" works can be called "masterpieces" at once. In the following millennia, the Egyptians were unable to build anything like the first pyramids. Their creative power is clearly exhausted. As if the source that fed her had dried up!
Researchers sort out, like beads, the links of a long-broken chain. Here is an ancient map that captures the world as we know it now, after the era of the Great Discoveries … Here are the myths and legends that have been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years: their characters are sailing over the sea; they know how to build cities and ships, they teach writing and art …
Lost links are twisted into a chain. Under the pressure of incomprehensible facts, the river of History - in separate, strange hypotheses - pours into a different channel. In the usual theories, human civilization, having barely originated in the deserts of Egypt or the wilds of America, immediately blossomed in magnificent color. The plant had not yet grown, but the flower was already showing off. Now, in new guesses, it grew and matured for a long time - far from the centers of culture we know. Only his seeds were brought there. What else do these strange hypotheses say? What happened to the "tree of culture"? Where are its roots?
Theater under the ice, characters in Egypt
Several decades ago, Erich von Deniken said that traces of extraterrestrial civilizations can be found on Earth. We used to call them "monuments of ancient cultures", not realizing that they were created by messengers from distant planets.
Graham Hancock believes that traces of another earthly civilization, still unknown, can be found on Earth. “Monuments of ancient cultures” are grains of knowledge scattered by her. She kept them for thousands of years, being isolated from wild, primitive tribes. The ocean was a reliable wall that protected the "cradle of culture" from barbarism. However, the ocean also turned out to be a land of oblivion: after its death, the first earthly civilization was completely forgotten.
So, if in 1491 Eurasia and North Africa were flooded by the ocean, then the descendants of the Indians would find it difficult to believe that on the site of the Northeast Ocean lay a special world, where temples and theaters were built, where they worshiped a single God or distant ancestors. where they knew the letter and measured the distance to the Sun.
Perhaps the first seeker of a forgotten culture was Charles Hapgood. Until his death in 1982, he tried to understand where was the homeland of the sailors who mapped the exact outlines of Antarctica. Finally he came to a conclusion. Their homeland was the Ice Continent, the no man's land.
15,000 years ago, this part of the world was not yet covered with ice, and it lay not at all where we are used to seeing it on the map: it was located 3200 kilometers north, in the region of the forties - fifties. It had a temperate climate and lush vegetation. Here was a kind of Eden - the ancestral home of our culture.
A catastrophe happened here about 12,500 years ago. Suddenly, the earth's crust moved. The shift was so powerful that Antarctica, like a toy tossed onto a conveyor belt, moved thousands of kilometers. She rolled across the globe and "got stuck" in the vicinity of the South Pole. All this was accompanied by earthquakes, floods, and a sharp cold snap. Towns and villages, pyramids and stone sculptures quickly covered with ice. The Antarctic civilization was destroyed. Her achievements are kept under a kilometer thick ice - in the eternal museum of humanity.
The surviving Antarctas left their homeland and sailed north. We have already traveled in their footsteps, looking into Egypt, South and Central America. When settling in these countries, they met the natives. By talking to them, they became missionaries. Like the builders of the British Empire, who in a couple of centuries taught almost all of Asia and Africa to speak English and live in a European way, these obscure aborigines of disappeared civilizations passed on their knowledge to many tribes living in coastal countries.
The missionaries taught them faith and themselves replenished their pantheon, turning into "white gods", now into "cultural heroes." They taught them a lot of useful things: they taught them how to build large stone buildings, including pyramids and observatories, told the secrets of mathematics and astronomy, told about other lands and the seas lying on the way to them …
The history of the "Antarcts" was engraved in the collective memory of many primitive peoples: this is how the omnipotent gods, similar to people, penetrate into myths and life (later the Europeans who "discovered" them will leave the same mark in the minds of savages); this is how myths are formed about the Flood destroying the whole world. So the sad experience became a storehouse of the spiritual experience of humanity.
Graham Hancock was a staunch supporter of Hapgood's theory. In his travels in South and Central America, he found new facts to prove it.
In ancient Mexico, a creature named Quetzalcoatl was revered. He taught people how to cultivate the land and how to count time by the stars. His appearance was sudden. He sailed from across the sea, "in a boat that went by itself, without oars." In Teotihuacan, in the temple of Quetzalcoatl, there is his image, carved out of stone. The sight of God is surprising: he wears … a beard, but the local Indians did not grow a beard. It is easy to invent the unthinkable, but to invent a believable detail is almost unthinkable.
Similar gods-heroes were also in the mythology of the Maya and Inca. Among the Egyptians, another "divine brother", Osiris, was engaged in "restoring order in the country".
The battle with the ghost of Antarctica
Most historians refer to Hapgood's theory as "something beyond science." The same attitude towards Hancock. It is not for nothing that in the circles of specialists there is now the formula "hancockism", which they condemn all attempts to represent the life of "Antarctic-Atlanteans".
Yes, Hapgood's hypothesis forced a new look at the myth of Atlantis, once told by Plato and still excites romantic minds. After all, Atlantis does not have to be placed in the Mediterranean Sea or in the region of Bermuda or the Canary Islands. Atlantis - only flooded not by water, but by ice - could become the entire Antarctic continent, if the shift of the earth's crust really threw it from temperate latitudes to high, destructive for life.
However, if you return from the realm of myths and legends, part with Osiris and Quetzalcoatl, then it should be admitted that there are no less shaky arguments in favor of "Antarctic civilization". The facts presented can be interpreted differently.
For example, the Sphinx. Are a hundred and twenty centuries really looking at us from the cracks that split it? American geologist James E. Harrell of Toledo University (Ohio) has a different explanation for its erosion.
Around 2300 BC e. there were still light rains in Egypt. As it seeped into the ground, rainwater washed salts from the upper, soft layers of limestone. Every year, during the flood of the Nile, groundwater again carried these salts to the surface of the earth. Perhaps the water flooded the base of the Sphinx, and the salts dissolved in it settled on the stone and crystallized, and getting into the pores of the limestone and hardening, burst them. The pores became wider, merged into cracks. So traces of erosion appeared, which made it possible to date the monument to a completely different millennium.
Or cocaine in mummies. This discovery, made in recent years, has generated a lot of controversy. Doesn't it prove that the Egyptians were in America? No, there are thousands of plant species in Africa, whose chemical composition has not been studied at all. Perhaps some of them contain microscopic doses of cocaine. Why couldn't the Egyptians use them to mummify the dead?
And the architecture of the pyramids? Why did the Egyptians know that their walls can only be erected at an angle of 52 ° and no more? Didn't the Antarctas tell them this? No, recent discoveries in Egypt suggest that the Egyptians learned the laws of building mechanics by trial and error.
But what about the Piri Reis map? Can't you deny its authenticity? No, but the interpretation can be challenged. Here is what archaeologist Nick Thorpe from King Alfred College (Winchester) notes: “If we mentally remove all the ice from the Antarctic continent, the outlines of the continent will not be the same as before the glaciation. Under the weight of the ice, the earth's crust was noticeably compressed here. The contours of the coastline have changed. " If on the Piri Reis map a certain continent really resembles modern Antarctica, this does not mean that in the days of the "Antarctic-Atlanteans" it also looked like this. In addition, Hapgood explained that Antarctica has moved 3000 kilometers, but this idea is not supported by any maps.
Certainly, the credibility of the Piri Reis map stems from the fact that it depicts the Mediterranean Sea with amazing accuracy; all bays, shoals, currents, islets are marked. The millennial tradition of ancient and Byzantine cartographers affected here. And here is the same map - the ancient "encyclopedia of seas and lands" - unexpectedly informs that in the South Pole region lies another part of the world, for us similar to Antarctica. However, for the contemporaries of Piri Reis, the appearance on the map of the unknown Southern Land was not surprising.
Long before the discovery of Antarctica, medieval geographers were sure of the existence of a continent in its place. The very idea of balance in nature, so important for ancient science, convinced that vast areas of land must exist in the regions of the planet inaccessible, otherwise the world would have toppled over. Therefore, not only the Piri Reis map, but also many other maps depict this Southern Land - in our understanding, "Antarctica". A detailed review of these maps is given in the book of the American geographer R. Ramsey "Discoveries that never happened."
Finally, serious scientists do not support Hapgood's main argument: a rapid shift in the earth's crust, allegedly leading to the movement of Antarctica by 3000 kilometers. This idea is in no way consistent with the generally accepted theory of global plate tectonics. Yes, the continents drift, but they don't rush across the oceans like speedboats.
Geologists have no evidence to prove that the Earth experienced a major catastrophe about 12,500 years ago. Hapgood referred to the fact that "it was at this time that hundreds of mammoths died out in Siberia." However, it has long been proven that Siberian mammoth cemeteries are much older. The Flood legends popular in the Middle East and other Mediterranean regions are far from echoing the troubles that plagued Antarctica. It is assumed that many legends are based on genuine events that played out several thousand years ago in Europe: then the waters of the Mediterranean flooded the Isthmus of the Bosphorus and rushed towards the Black Sea; the vast lowland adjacent to it disappeared under the water.
However, supporters of fashionable hypotheses reciprocate scientists. According to them, all the objections of the critics are exactly the same hypotheses, only clothed in strictly scientific formulations. "We are dealing with an almost pathological desire of specialists to suppress any attempt to discuss mysterious historical phenomena," - Graham Hancock justifies the fiasco in scholarly battles.
The end of the dispute is not in sight - unless one of the parties will be able to cut through the ice shell of Antarctica and get a couple of artifacts from there, for example, a cuneiform textbook on the construction of pyramids … Or not find anything, as historians tend to think.
“By and large,” says the British writer Colin Wilson, who published Hancock’s book, “the question of whether there was once an unknown civilization that gave rise to our entire culture is not so important.” Another thing is important.
Our history is a series of cultures replacing each other. The famous historian Arnold Toynbee, by the end of his life, counted, for example, 37 civilizations. Many of them blossomed long ago and perished, leaving their descendants separate texts - codes of laws, holy books, poems and myths - or architectural monuments: ruins of temples, columns, fragments of statues.
Civilizations are like people who have left us forever. We remember their names - Northern, Andean, Aegean, Elamite, Urartian; we keep things left by them; we are restoring their fate bit by bit - by scraps of “family legends” and by buttons, beads and crockery shards that accidentally caught our eyes. But how much is irretrievably lost! We look back, seek advice, but the river of time brings us only scraps of old thoughts - dim reflections of other people's insights.
Is this the reason for the interest in the secrets of the past? “The temple has fallen; and his descendant did not understand the ruins of the language”(E. Baratynsky). We passionately want to understand every word dropped by our ancestors. Thousands of worries consume us. We are trying to find a way out, but we seem to ourselves to be dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. As if spellbound, we look at them - our only support in the stormy waters of history - and we strive to understand: what wisdom did they gain, who knew the same problems? What solution did you find? What did they manage to say, but we could not hear? We look at their ghost, born of our half-knowledge and dreams. We are looking for an answer, and we are looking only at beads, buttons, shards and meager lines of texts that have not yet been lost. And we are eternally visited by the dream that somewhere on the planet - not on the well-trodden paths of Greece, not on the fossil land of Palestine - the greatest secrets of mankind are still kept. It remains only to find the treasure.
The Hapgood-Hancock theory feeds this dream of knowledge that we have to acquire. All earthly wisdom, bound in ice, awaits its hour - the source of great civilizations.
Near the station "Vostok" just right to drive a peg with a sign "Keep forever" - if not the heritage of the ancient "Antarct", then at least a dream about it!
Pyramids by trial and error
In the El-Fayyum oasis in Meidum, Pharaoh Sneferu (2570–2545 BC) decided to erect a 92-meter-high pyramid, the walls of which were unusually steep (their ascent angle reached 52 °). By its appearance, this monument was supposed to resemble the pyramid of one of its predecessors, Djoser. Not long before the completion of the work, apparently, a disaster struck. The outer, stone facing of the pyramid, as one of the theories says, crawled downward and carried many blocks along with it. At the foot of the pyramid, a mountain of rubble and boulders froze. The blunder of the ancient builders is immortalized in the form of a monumental "stump" 70 meters high.
Apparently, Sneferu immediately ordered the construction of a new pyramid - this time in Dakhshur, a few kilometers south of Meidum. The walls got even steeper: 54 °. Estimated height: 128 meters. However, as the walls grew, the pharaoh became more and more anxious. The memory of the catastrophe in Meidum did not leave him. Finally, when the pyramid was already half built, doubts overpowered his proud soul. He ordered to change the angle of inclination of the walls, to make them flatter, down-to-earth. Now they were rising at an angle of 43 °. Thus, the so-called Broken Pyramid appeared in Dahshur.
It seemed that now he could calm down? No, Snefer wanted - after his life - to lie down in a normal, like everyone else's, pyramid, whose sacred forms are not distorted in a hurry. Then he ordered to build the Red Pyramid in the same place, in Dakhshur, a little to the north of Broken. This time, the angle of inclination of its walls was 43 ° from the very beginning.
Perhaps events did not unfold according to such a scenario, but, be that as it may, the facts are clear: the miscalculations in the construction of these pyramids cannot be hidden. So, the ancient builders made mistakes, and mistakes are inherent in man, and not in the ideal extraterrestrial intelligence or visiting connoisseurs of architecture from Antarctica. They would have erected the pyramid on the first try.
In Shakespeare's time, any humanist knew about Antarctica
American historian Raymond Ramsay in the pages of the book "Discoveries that never happened" thoroughly investigated one of the "unsolvable" mysteries of geography: many old maps (not only on the Piri Reis map) depict, albeit most often incorrectly … Antarctica. How did Renaissance cartographers know about it? One will involuntarily believe in aliens who flew around the Earth with an inspection, or in the messengers of the "Antarctic culture" that brought maps of their homeland to Egypt …
However, this belief is dispelled in the light of the facts. Even ancient geographers were convinced that "the world known to them is no more than a quarter of the earth's surface" (R. Ramsey). Applying simple physical laws to geography, the Greeks believed that Europe, Asia and Africa were kept in equilibrium by the vast Southern Earth (in our view, Antarctica).
On the world map attributed to Ptolemy, Africa is just a huge peninsula of the South Earth, and the Indian Ocean is the same inland sea as the Mediterranean: from the south it is bounded by Terra Australis Incognita.
At the time of the Great Geographical Discoveries, many expeditions sailed towards the "wingman". A journey due south would inevitably lead them to Southern Land. When Magellan discovered Tierra del Fuego, university geographers considered it a peninsula of the South Earth (and this opinion held for a whole century).
As the "white spots" disappeared from the map of the planet, the outlines of the Southern Earth became more and more defined. On one of the maps at the beginning of the 16th century, South Earth is a strip near the South Pole. In 1531, the French mathematician Orons Phine fills in the void at the bottom of the map with a fairly accurate, albeit very extensive, depiction of the Southern Earth, embellishing it with mountain peaks and convenient bays. On the map of Gerardus Mercator in 1569, the South Earth grows even more and almost borders on the island of Java.
The imaginary "Antarctica" remains on the map of the Earth until the 17th century. Only then did geographers begin to map only the lands they knew. Inaccessible parts of the world began to gap on the maps with "blank spots".