America, 1492 – a vast and unexplored continent. When Christopher Columbus dropped anchor after his long voyage of adventure and discovery he laid claim to the territory for Europe and the rest of the Western world. The primitive peoples he encountered knew nothing of his world, and he knew little of theirs. History has left us a legacy of discovery to marvel at, of virgin soil trampled by European boots for the first time ever. Columbus' quest to find the North West Passage to India may have been a dismal failure, but it was through him that the Old World of Europe came to know about the New World of the Americas. Or was it?
Mediaeval explorers had precious few really reliable maps to guide them around the mysterious open expanses of the world's oceans. Outside the established and well-documented trade routes to the Far East and around the Mediterranean, whole expanses of sea were decorated on maps with pictures of freakish sea monsters and avoided as places of ill-omen and certain doom. The farthest reaches of the world were drawn in as vague and misshapen land masses distorted in size and shape. A great unknown world so little understood even in comparatively recent times.
And yet there are anomalies in the field of cartography, curious hints and undeniable indications of ancient knowledge of the geography of the world, perhaps even of an ancient global community of experienced seafarers – an empire of forgotten and near-mythical sea kings.
Was this where the legends of Atlantis were born? Is the Atlantis myth, and others like it, an attempt to explain how the human race's previous knowledge of the world's anatomy was lost for centuries...?
Cartography has only been an exact science for the last two centuries. Before this, the lack of instruments to determine longitude caused inevitable errors in judgment in terms of both the size and relative positions of countries. The mediaeval maps which survive today all too often seem amateurish attempts at their art, but it should always be remembered that before the chronometer was developed in the reign of George III there was no exact method of ascertaining longitude except by timing an eclipse. There were publications available to assist in this task – the early Almanacs and Ephemerides (still available to this day) – but the calculations involved to convert this data into longitude were complicated and beyond the reach of your average mediaeval mapmaker.
Latitude could be determined by at least the 15th or 16th century by astronomical observations, and there are altogether less errors on the maps of this time with regards to how far north or south a place was.
However there are many 16th century European maps in existence that not only show remarkably accurate locations of countries, but also show details which seem anomalous in terms of the knowledge currently accepted as being extant at the time these maps were published. Details for example of countries supposedly not discovered until much later than the time of the maps, highly detailed studies of particular tracts of land which suggest far more exploration than the history books will allow took place. More particularly these maps highlight two key features which the history books ignore completely: the apparently advanced scientific detail of these maps produced in a time when cartography was barely out of its most embryonic state; and the alarming geological data depicted on the maps of certain locations such as Antarctica.
Perhaps the mystery is not as profound as it would appear. Many 16th century maps were copies drawn from earlier standard maps, known as portolanos, which date mainly from the 13th and 14th centuries. These are (as we would expect) not drawn on grids representing latitude and longitude, but on a circular grid which radiates from a different point depending on the particular bias of the mapmaker. Portolanos were invaluable to mariners as they facilitated navigation by the use of compasses, without the need for complex mathematical equations to be performed at every change in direction. So are our 16th maps simply copies of these primitive portolanos updated with current astronomical, mathematical and scientific information?
There is certainly a degree of similarity between the two forms of map, and it is without a doubt that the famous 16th maps of Piri Re'is, Oronteus Finaeus and Gerhard Kremer (known as Mercator) were to some extent drawn from existing copies of portolanos still in use on the high seas during this period.
But are there still hidden depths to the mediaeval portolanos? Were they drawn from actual data collated by seafaring adventurers of the 14th and 15th centuries? The simple fact is that most sea voyages undertaken at this time were not gung-ho Columbus-style missions of discovery, but prosaic journeys along familiar trade routes, largely conducted in safe and well-charted waters. It was not until the later era of the Renaissance that travel by sea really came into its own, outside of the Mediterranean nations who had been sailing for millennia. So how do so many seemingly anomalous details find their way onto these maps?
After much investigation by interested parties, it was discovered that in fact the 14th and 15th century portolanos were far from being original documents themselves. Much of their content was not derived from personal experience of the lands depicted, but copied slavishly from even older texts, handed down from an obscure and untraceable antiquity, to create composite maps drawn from several different sources. And it is this fact which so persuasively suggests an ancient global community as described at the start of this article.
In order to gain a true picture of what these maps show, we must go into some detail on one of the most famous and draw conclusions from the evidence of what is printed therein.
The Piri Re'is map of 1513 contains many plates showing different areas of the Atlantic coasts of the world from France to the Caribbean in the north and as far as Antarctica in the south. The mere proposition that any map of 1513 could show Antarctica at all is startling, and since the map's discovery in 1929 in what was then Constantinople (now Istanbul) it has puzzled and bemused cartographers and historians alike. This early atlas has some very interesting things to show us with regards to many areas of the globe, but it is in Antarctica that the biggest anomaly occurs, an anomaly which is amplified by its recurrence in later maps. In comparison with a modern map of the same area, the Piri Re'is map is surprisingly accurate, despite the glaring omission of certain bodies of water within the continent which make the surface area of land seem greater than it should be. The Piri Re'is however shows us something even more bizarre. It clearly depicts the coastline of Antarctica, minus its characteristic two mile thick pack ice! How can this be? The only way it can possibly be – given that we know from modern scientific analysis of the ice and subsoil of the area how long the ice has been there – is if the Piri Re'is was drawn from information given, that is a map made, at a time before the ice came. In geological terms, this means that this source map would have had to have been drawn at least 6000 years ago!
Reason and logic will say that such a thing cannot be possible. What could anyone possibly have been doing even circumnavigating Antarctica in that distant era, let alone mapping it accurately with full awareness of the scientific location of the Pole?
And yet the evidence of the Piri Re'is map suggests exactly this, and it is not alone in challenging our perceptions of the boundaries of ancient knowledge. Another Turkish map, the Hadji Ahmed map of 1559, goes even further, suggesting not only an Antarctic landscape without pack ice, but also shows what appears to be the land bridge which once existed between Alaska and Siberia. This land bridge, perhaps as much as a thousand miles across, existed during the last Ice Age, around 8000-10,000 years ago! How can these dates possibly correlate to human endeavours in mapmaking, unless we come to the fantastic conclusion that the legends of Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu might just have some basis in reality?!
Atlantean myths have been attached to almost every part of the world at one time or another, and Antarctica is no exception. Although less well known as a possible source of the legendary continent, there have nevertheless been occasions when the mysterious southern Polar region has been suggested. Did the great civilisation not so much sink beneath the waves of a tidal catastrophe as become entrapped in the encroaching ice of the last Ice Age?
According to some psychically channelled information, Atlantis and Lemuria once covered the entire world, and were far larger areas than conventional wisdom derived from Plato might suggest. What these ancient and anomalous maps seem to suggest is that the varied locations for their former existence are not so far-fetched as has often been thought.
Since they purportedly covered the whole expanse of the Earth's surface, both Atlantis and Lemuria must have been seafaring nations. Is this our missing race of ancient sea kings? Are maps such as the Piri Re'is their forgotten legacy of knowledge to us in our so-called enlightened days?
It is obvious from the scientific analysis of the mediaeval maps that they were clearly not original products of the mapmakers of their age, but must have been copies of earlier texts which paradoxically show more knowledge of geography than the time in which they were copied. Conventional history and science will say that a race cannot regress, it must always progress, and yet it is not merely with mapmaking and navigation that such an apparent loss of intelligence is found. All who visit them marvel at the three magnificent pyramids on the Giza plateau in Egypt, and yet so much spurious nonsense has been written about them and condemned to perpetual repetition in a thousand history books that the simple truths of the Pyramid Age have all but been forgotten. It is easy to say that the Giza pyramids were the highlights of the pyramid building era in Egypt, but the simple fact is that they were also very early examples of the art. And it is equally true to state categorically that while they still stand, barely touched by the hand of time, pyramids constructed centuries later have crumbled to dust. Can the scientific and mathematical knowledge required to construct these feats of engineering have been lost?
It is interesting to note then that the only confirmed report of Atlantis, that is Plato's descriptions of it in 'Timaeus' and 'Critias', is supposedly derived from a story told to Plato by Solon, who learned it from the ancient priests of Egypt.
The picture is now starting to come together. Egypt, and other ancient civilisations possessing great advanced knowledge of science, such as the Mayans, Aztecs and the builders of Stonehenge and the Avebury complex could perhaps have been colonies founded by the survivors of the last great catastrophes of Atlantis and Lemuria. How the Atlanteans came by their knowledge is still open to debate. Some writers have suggested they came from another planet to start life on Earth – it is not my intention to go into this right now, but it would be fascinating to do a follow-up piece on the curious theories propounded in this field.
The maps which survive clearly depict images with which the contemporaneous navigator would have been unfamiliar. Evidence of great antiquity has been found in these maps, of a date stretching back into the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago. Knowledge represented on these maps seems to suggest the discovery or awareness of continents and countries not supposedly discovered until many centuries later, particularly a detailed study of Antarctica in the days before it became enshrouded in ice. And all of this information seems to run back through the great ancient civilisations of the world, through South American cultures, through European cultures, and through the pinnacle of Egypt's glory, right back into the mythic past of the legendary races which once walked this Earth, the Atlanteans and Lemurians.
If all of this information could be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, all the world's history books would have to be revised, and this is the very reason why so many conventional historians are reluctant to face up to the truths to be found in these survivals of antiquity, our anomalous maps. The only people prepared to stand up and be controversial are those who have shut out what they have been taught and looked at the evidence for themselves with open eyes and an open mind. The truth is most certainly out there, and it is to these few visionaries of our age – men such as Robert Bauval, Graham Hancock and Alan Alford – that we must look if we are to decode the true secrets of the ancient races who once called this planet of ours home...
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