Piri Reis Map Mysteries

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The year is 1929. In the Istanbul Topkapi Palace ("Topkapi Sarayi"), a fragment of a certain nautical chart was found, executed on parchment from the skin of a gazelle. It is carefully studied and attributed to the eminent Turkish admiral Haji Muhiddin Piri ibn Haji Mehmed (Piri Reisu), dating back to 1513.

Tourists crossing the Dardanelles in the Canakkale region are usually so carried away by the stories about the armies of Xerxes and Alexander the Great, who crossed the Dardanelles many centuries ago, that they completely ignore the modest bust installed on the European side of the strait next to the crossing. Few people know that the modest signature "Piri Reis" under the bust connects this place with one of history's most intriguing mysteries.

The map might not have aroused much interest if not for the image of both Americas on it (one of the earliest in history) and the signature of the Turkish admiral Piri Reis. Then, in the 1920s, in the wake of the national upsurge, it was especially important for the Turks to emphasize the role of the Turkish cartographer in creating one of the earliest maps of America. They began to study the map closely, as well as the history of its creation. And this is what became known.

In 1513, the admiral of the Turkish fleet, Piri Reis, completed work on a large map of the world for his geographical atlas "Bahriye". He himself did not travel much, but when making a map, he used about 20 cartographic sources. Of these, eight maps belonged to the time of Ptolemy, some belonged to Alexander the Great, and one, as Piri Reis writes in his book "The Seven Seas", "was recently compiled by an unfaithful named Colombo." And then the admiral says: “An unfaithful named Colombo, a Genoese, discovered these lands. In the hands of the named Colombo, one book fell into which he read that on the edge of the Western Sea, far in the West, there are shores and islands. All kinds of metals and precious stones were found there. The aforementioned Colombo studied this book for a long time … Colombo also learned about the passion of the natives for glass jewelry from this book and took them with him to exchange them for gold."

Let's leave aside Columbus and his mysterious book for now, although the direct indication that he knew where he was sailing is already amazing. Unfortunately, neither this book nor the map of Columbus has reached us. But several sheets of the map from the atlas "Bahriye" miraculously survived and in 1811 were published in Europe. But then they were not given special importance. It wasn't until 1956, when a Turkish naval officer donated maps to the US Naval Hydrographic Office, that US military cartographers conducted research to confirm or deny the seemingly impossible: the map depicted the coastline of Antarctica - 300 years before its discovery!

So the Piri Reis map began to reveal its secrets. Here are just a few of them.

Naval Museum of Turkey. In the Memorial Hall there are plaques with the names of those killed at sea (the oldest date is 1319). Here you can also see a rare collection of old navigational charts, and copies of them can be bought at the souvenir shop. The most famous of these is the plan of Admiral Piri Reis (1517)

Antarctica as a continent was discovered in 1818, but many cartographers, including Gerard Mercator, believed in the existence of the continent in the extreme south and mapped its supposed outlines on their maps. The Piri Reis map, as already mentioned, displays the coastline of Antarctica with high accuracy - 300 years before its discovery!

But this is not the biggest mystery, especially since several ancient maps are known, including the Mercator map, on which, as it turned out, Antarctica is depicted, and very accurately. Previously, this was simply not paid attention to, because the "appearance" of the continent on the map can be greatly distorted depending on the cartographic projections used: it is not so easy to project the surface of the globe onto a plane. The fact that many ancient maps reproduce with high accuracy not only Antarctica, but also other continents, became known after calculations made in the middle of the last century, taking into account various projections used by old cartographers.

But the fact that the Piri Reis map shows the coast of Antarctica, not yet covered with ice, is difficult to comprehend! After all, the modern appearance of the coastline of the southern continent is set by a powerful ice cover extending far beyond the real land. It turns out that Piri Reis used sources that were made by people who saw Antarctica before the glaciation? But this cannot be, since these people should have lived millions of years ago!

The only explanation for this fact accepted by modern scientists is the theory of a periodic change of the Earth's poles, according to which the last such change could have occurred about 6,000 years ago, and it was then that Antarctica began to be covered with ice again. That is, we are talking about the navigators who lived 6,000 years ago and made maps, according to which (as on the Piri Reis map) modern ones were refined? Incredible …

On July 6, 1960, the United States Air Force replied to Professor Charles Hapgood of Keene College in response to his request for an estimate of the ancient Piri Reis map:

July 6, 1960

Theme: Map of Admiral Piri Reis

To: Professor Charles Hapgood

Kiin College

Keene, New Hampshire

Official science all this time said that the ice cap of Antarctica is a million years old. The map shows the northern part of this continent without ice cover. Then the map must be at least a million years old, which is impossible, because humanity did not yet exist at that time.

Further, more careful research revealed the date of the end of the last iceless period: 6,000 years ago. There is controversy over the start date of this period, from 13,000 to 9,000 years ago. The big question is, who mapped Queen Maud Land 6,000 years ago? What unknown civilization had this technology?

According to traditional views, the first civilization was formed 5,000 ago in Mesopotamia, and was soon followed by the Indian and Chinese. Accordingly, none of these civilizations could do this. But who lived 6,000 years ago with technology available only today?

In the Middle Ages, special nautical charts ("portolani") appeared, on which all sea routes, shores, bays, straits, etc. were accurately plotted. Most of them described the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, as well as some others. One of these maps was drawn by Piri Reis. But on some of them, unknown lands were visible, which the sailors kept in the strictest confidence. It is believed that Columbus was among these chosen sailors.

To draw the map, Reis used several sources collected during his travels. He put notes on the map, by which we can understand what kind of work he did. He writes that he is not responsible for intelligence and mapping data, but only for the unification of all sources. He claims that one of the source maps was drawn by modern Reisu sailors, and the others in the 4th century BC. or even earlier.

Dr. Charles Hapgood, in the foreword to his book Maps of Ancient Sea Kings (Turnstone books, London, 1979), writes:

It seems that information was transmitted very carefully between people. The origin of the cards is unknown; perhaps they were made by the Minoans or Phoenicians, who for millennia were the best sailors of antiquity. We have evidence that they collected and studied the great Library of Alexandria in Egypt, and their knowledge was useful to the geographers of that time.

Piri Reis may have obtained some maps from the Library of Alexandria, a well-known and important source of knowledge from ancient times. In accordance with Hapgood's reconstruction, copies of these documents and some other sources were moved to other cultural centers, incl. and to Constantinople. Then, in 1204 (the year of the 4th Crusade), when the Venetians entered the city, these cards began to circulate among European sailors.

Hapgood continues:

Most of these maps were for the Mediterranean and Black Seas. But the maps of other regions have also survived: both Americas, the Arctic and the Antarctic. It became clear that the ancients could swim from pole to pole. It may sound incredible, but the evidence confirms that some ancient explorers studied Antarctica before it was covered with ice, and that they had an accurate navigational instrument for determining longitude, more advanced than that of ancient, medieval and modern explorers. until the second half of the 18th century. […]

This evidence of ancient technology will support and complement many other hypotheses about lost civilizations. Scientists have so far managed to refute most of these hypotheses, calling them myths, but this evidence cannot be refuted. It also requires a broader view of all previous statements."

Map tied to Cairo

Interestingly, the Piri Reis map also gives an answer to the question of where these ancient sailors lived. (Or not seafarers, if they used other means of transportation?) The fact is that a professional cartographer, studying an ancient map and checking it with modern ones, can determine what type of projection the creator of the map used. And when the Piri Reis map was compared with the modern one, drawn in the polar equal area projection, they found their almost complete similarity. In particular, the map of the Turkish admiral of the 16th century literally repeats the map drawn up by the US Air Force during the Great Patriotic War.

But a map drawn in a polar equal-area projection must have a center. In the case of the American map, it was Cairo, where the American military base was located during the war years. And from this, as the Chicago scientist Charles Hapgood, who thoroughly studied the Piri Reis map, showed, it directly follows that the center of the ancient map, which became the prototype of the admiral's map, was located exactly there, in Cairo, or its environs. That is, the ancient cartographers were the Egyptians who lived in Memphis, or their more ancient ancestors, who made this place a reference point.

But whoever they were, they skillfully mastered their craft. As soon as the researchers began to study the fragments of the Turkish admiral's map that have come down to us, they were faced with the question of the authorship of its original source. The Piri Reis map is a so-called portolan, a nautical chart that allows you to build "lines between ports", that is, to navigate between port cities.

In the 15th – 16th centuries, such maps were much more perfect than land maps, but, as noted by one of the leading scientists in this area, AE Nordenskjold, they did not develop. That is, the maps of the 15th century were of the same quality as the cards of the 14th century. This, from his point of view, indicates that the skill of the cartographers was not acquired, but borrowed, that is, in other words, they simply redrawn older maps, which is natural in itself.

But what does not fit in my head is the accuracy of the constructions and the mathematical apparatus, without which these constructions are simply impossible to carry out. Here are just a few facts.

It is known that to build a geographic map, that is, to display a sphere on a plane, it is necessary to know the dimensions of this sphere, that is, the Earth. Eratosthenes was able to measure the circumference of the globe in ancient times, but he did it with a large error. Until the 15th century, no one specified these data. However, a thorough study of the coordinates of objects on the Peary map indicates that the dimensions of the Earth were taken into account without error, that is, the compilers of the map had more accurate information about our planet (not to mention the fact that they represented it as a ball).

The researchers of the Turkish map have also convincingly shown that the compilers of the mysterious ancient primary source owned trigonometry (the Reis map is drawn using plane geometry, where latitudes and longitudes are at right angles. But it was copied from a map with spherical trigonometry! The ancient cartographers not only knew that the Earth is a ball, but also calculated the length of the equator with an accuracy of about 100 km!) And cartographic projections that were not known to either Eratosthenes or even Ptolemy, and they could theoretically use ancient maps stored in the Library of Alexandria … That is, the original source of the map is definitely more ancient.

In 1953, a Turkish naval officer sent a Piri Reis map to the US Navy's Hydrographic Bureau for inspection by Chief Engineer M. Walters, who called in Arlington Mallary, a respected ancient map researcher with whom he had previously worked. After a long study, Mallary found a map projection view. To check the accuracy of the map, he plotted a grid on the map, and then transferred it to the globe: the map was absolutely accurate. Mallary argues that aerial photography is essential for this accuracy. But who had planes 6,000 years ago?

The hydrographic bureau did not believe their eyes: the map turned out to be more accurate than modern data, so they even had to be corrected! The accuracy of determining the longitudinal coordinates indicated that spheroid trigonometry was used here, officially unknown until the middle of the 18th century.

Hapgood proved that the Reis map is drawn using plane geometry, where latitudes and longitudes are at right angles. But it was copied from a map with spherical trigonometry! Ancient cartographers not only knew that the Earth is a ball, but also calculated the length of the equator with an accuracy of about 100 km!

Hapgood sent his collection of ancient maps (and the Reis map was not the only one) to Richard Strachan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hapgood wanted to know exactly the level of mathematical knowledge needed to build such maps. In 1965, Strachen replied that the level must be very high: using spheroid geometry, data on the curvature of the Earth, and projection methods.

Look at the Piri Reis map with projected parallels and meridians:

The accuracy of the mapping of Queen Maud Land, coastline, plateaus, deserts, bays was confirmed by the Swedish-British Antarctic Expedition in 1949 (as Olmeyer said in a letter to Hapgood). The researchers used sonar and seismic sounding to determine the relief under the ice about 1.5 km thick.

In 1953, Hapgood wrote the book The Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Sciences, where he proposed a theory to explain how Antarctica could have been ice-free before 4000 BC. (see Bibliography). The essence of the theory is as follows:

Antarctica was ice-free (and, therefore, much warmer) due to the fact that it was once not in the South Pole, but about 3000 km to the north, which, according to Hapgood, “would define it outside the Arctic Circle, and in warmer climates."

The displacement of the continent further south to its current position could be caused by the so-called displacement of the earth's crust (not to be confused with continental drift and plate tectonics). This mechanism explains how "the entire lithosphere of a planet can sometimes shift along the surface of the softer inner layers, just as the whole orange peel moves along the surface of the pulp when it loses strong contact with it." (Quote from Hapgood's Maps of Ancient Sea Kings, see the Bibliography for details).

This theory was sent to Albert Einstein, who gave it very positive feedback. And although geologists did not accept the idea, Einstein was much more open to Hapgood's statements like this: “In the polar regions, there is a monolithic deposit of ice, asymmetrically located relative to the pole. The rotation of the Earth affects these masses, forming a centrifugal moment that is transmitted to the rigid earth's crust. The moment constantly increasing in this way will shift the crust over the entire surface of the Earth when it reaches a certain force."(Einstein's Foreword to the book" The Shifting Crust of the Earth … ", part one.)

In any case, even if Hapgood's theory is correct, the mystery still remains. The Piri Reis map should not exist. It cannot be that so long ago someone was able to draw such an accurate map. The first instrument for calculating longitude with the necessary precision was invented in 1761 by John Harrison. Before that, there was no way to calculate longitude so accurately: the errors were hundreds of kilometers. And the Reis map is one of several that showcase supposedly unknown lands, impossible knowledge, and superb accuracy that surprises even today.

Reis indicated that he was based on ancient maps, which, in turn, were also copied from even more ancient and even more accurate records. For example, the map "Portolano" Dulcert, drawn by him in 1339, shows the exact longitudes of Europe and North. Africa, and the coordinates of the Mediterranean and Black Seas are plotted with an accuracy of half a degree. An even more surprising drawing is Zeno's map from 1380. It covers the area as far as Greenland, and its accuracy is amazing. Hapgood writes: "It is impossible for anyone in the 14th century to know the exact coordinates of these places." Another striking map belongs to the Turk Haji Ahmed (1559), which shows a strip of approx. 1600 km long linking Alaska and Siberia. This isthmus is now covered with water due to the Ice Age, which raised the water level in the ocean.

Oronteus Fineus is another man who drew a map with incredible accuracy in 1532. His Antarctica was also devoid of ice. There are maps of Greenland as two separate islands, which was confirmed by a French expedition, which discovered that the ice cap covered two separate islands.

As we can see, many maps of antiquity covered almost the entire surface of the Earth. They seem to be parts of an older map of the world, made by unknowns with the help of technologies rediscovered only today. While the great-people supposedly lived in a primitive way, someone “put on paper” the entire geography of the Earth. And this common knowledge somehow fell into pieces, now collected by several people who have lost this knowledge and simply copied what they found in libraries, bazaars and all sorts of other places.

Hapgood took it one step further by discovering a cartographic document that copied an older Chinese map from 1137 and engraved on a stone pillar. She demonstrated the same high level of technology, the same gridding method and the same spheroid geometry techniques. It shares so many similarities with Western maps that it can be assumed that they had a common source. Could it be a lost civilization that existed thousands of years before?

The map shows both Americas

The Piri Reis map is one of the first to show both Americas. It was compiled 21 years after the voyage of Columbus and the "official" discovery of America. And not only the exact coastline is marked on it, but also the rivers, and even the Andes. And this despite the fact that Columbus himself did not map America, having sailed only to the Caribbean islands!

The mouths of some rivers, in particular the Orinoco, are shown on the Piri Reis map with an "error": the river deltas are not indicated. However, this speaks rather not of an error, but of the expansion of the deltas that occurred over time, as was the case with the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia in the last 3500 years.

Columbus knew where he was sailing

Piri Reis claimed that Columbus knew well where he was sailing, thanks to the book that fell into his hands. The fact that Columbus's wife was the daughter of the Grand Master of the Order of the Knights Templar, which had already changed its name by that time, and possessed significant archives of ancient books and maps, indicates a possible way of acquiring the mysterious book (to date, a lot has been written about the Templar fleet and the high probability of their regular voyages to America).

There are many facts indirectly confirming that Columbus owned one of the maps that served as the source for the Piri Reis map. For example, Columbus did not stop ships at night, as was customary for fear of crashing into reefs in unknown waters, but went under full sail, as if knowing for sure that there would be no obstacles. When a riot began on the ships due to the fact that the promised land was not shown, he managed to convince the sailors to endure another 1000 miles and was not mistaken - exactly 1000 miles later the long-awaited coast appeared. Columbus was carrying a supply of glass jewelry, hoping to exchange them for gold from the Indians, as recommended in his book. Finally, each ship had a sealed packet with instructions on what to do if the ships lost sight of each other during a storm. In short, the discoverer of America knew well that he was not the first.

The Piri Reis map is not the only one

And the map of the Turkish admiral, the source for which was also the maps of Columbus, is not the only one of its kind. If you set yourself the goal, as Charles Hapgood did, to compare the images of Antarctica on several maps compiled before its "official" discovery, then there will be no doubt about the existence of their common source. Hapgood meticulously compared the maps of Piri, Aranteus Finaus, Haji Ahmed and Mercator, created at different times and independently of each other, and determined that they all used the same unknown source, which made it possible to depict the polar continent with the greatest reliability long before its discovery.

Most likely, we will no longer know for sure who and when created this primary source. But its existence, convincingly proved by the researchers of the Turkish admiral's map, testifies to the existence of a certain ancient civilization with a level of scientific knowledge comparable to the modern one, at least in the field of geography (the Piri map, as already mentioned, made it possible to clarify some modern maps). And this casts doubt on the hypothesis of the gradual linear progress of mankind in general and science in particular. One gets the feeling that the greatest knowledge about nature, as if obeying an unknown law, at a certain stage becomes available to mankind, in order to then be lost and … be reborn again when the time comes. And who knows how many discoveries the next find will conceal?

The Piri Reis map often serves as proof that there was once an advanced civilization that we are now just beginning to learn about. The earliest known civilization, the Sumerian from Mesopotamia, appeared as if out of nowhere 6,000 years ago and had no experience of sea sailing and navigation. However, they spoke respectfully of their Nephilim ancestors, whom they considered gods.

Here are the main mysteries of the map: