People very soon noticed that Piri Reis’s handiwork only covered half the world; the gazelle hide was torn, so that the right side of the map was missing. Soon after its discovery, the German Orientalist Professor Kahle turned his attention to it, and in September 1931 at the 18th Orientalist Congress in the Dutch town of Leiden, he announced that Piri Reis must have used parts of a lost Columbus map.6 In the autumn of 1931, Professor Oberhammer, at that time also a member of the Vienna Academy of Science, examined this unusual object, and came to the same conclusion as his colleague Kahle.
A number of newspapers reported on the Piri Reis map, after which the “society for research into Turkish history” commissioned the state printing works in Istanbul to make the map available to a wider circle of scholars. In 1933, therefore, the map was transposed on to a metal printing plate and reproduced in a facsimile edition of 1,000 copies. The first edition ran out within a few months, so the supreme command of the Turkish navy (the Hydrographic Institute) commissioned a new print-run. This time, 12,500 copies of the maps were printed in full-size format, and 10,000 copies in a reduced size.
In the 1940s, copies of the Piri Reis map were bought by many museums and libraries. In 1954, a copy reached the desk of the American cartographer Arlington H. Mallery, who had specialized in old sea maps for decades. The Piri Reis map electrified Mallery, for at its lower edge was a continent with offshore islands, of which Piri Reis could have known nothing in 1513. This was Antarctica. Even if the Turk had used a map drawn by Christopher Columbus, this did not solve the riddle, for he too had known nothing of Antarctica.
Arlington Mallery asked his colleague, Walters, of the U.S. Navy’s Hydrographic Institute, for his opinion about the map. Walters was baffled. He was particularly astonished by the exactness of the distance between the Old and New Worlds. In 1513, when Piri Reis drew his map, America had not yet featured on any map, and even one drawn by Columbus could never have contained so many precise details. Even outlying areas, such as the high mountainous terrain in western South America, were reproduced—in other words regions which, as far as we know, were first explored by Francisco Pizarro (1478–1541). Equally baffling was the precise position of the Canary Islands or the Azores. The two cartographers also soon noticed that Piri Reis had either rejected the coordinates usual at the time, or had viewed the earth as a flat disc. In order to get a clear picture, Mallery and Walters placed a coordinate grid over the map, in order to transfer individual positions to a globe.
Now their astonishment was complete. Not only the contours of North and South America, but also Antarctica’s coastline, were positioned exactly where we would expect to find them today. But where a stormy sea now rages south of Terra del Fuego, there was a narrow bridge of land to Antarctica. Inch for inch they compared the Piri Reis map with land profiles which had been obtained by means of the most modem technology, both from the air and from echo-soundings at sea. Toward the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago, there had indeed been a land-bridge at this selfsame place. In the southern polar region, Piri Reis had mapped the coastline and its bays with painstaking accuracy, as well as the offshore islands. “No one can see these coastlines and islands today, for they are covered by a thick sheet of ice.”7
It was no different in Piri Reis’ day, so where did he get his information from?
During the International Year of Geophysics in 1957, the Jesuit Father Lineham, who was then director of Weston Observatory and a cartographer for the U.S. Navy, examined the Piri Reis map. He came to the same conclusion as his colleagues. The Antarctic part demonstrated an incredible accuracy, with many details which had only become generally known following the Swedish–British–Norwegian expeditions of 1949 and 1952. On August 28, 1958, the University of Georgetown organized a public hearing about the mystery of the Piri Reis map. Let me quote some excerpts from it:
Walters: It is difficult for us to understand nowadays how cartographers could have been so accurate many centuries before us, since it is only recently that we invented the modern, scientific method of cartography.
Mallery: This was, of course, a problem which we scratched our heads over. We could not imagine how such a precise map could have been made without airplanes. But the fact remains that they made it. And not only that: they got the longitude measurements absolutely right, something we have only been able to do in the last 200 years.
Walters: Father Lineham, you were involved in seismological research into Antarctica. Do you share the enthusiasm about these new discoveries?
Lineham: Certainly I do. With the seismological method we have discovered things which seem to confirm a great many of the drawings reproduced on the map: the land masses, the projection of mountains, seas, islands…. I think the seismological method will allow us to remove, as it were, more of the ice-layer from the regions depicted on the [Piri Reis] map, and this will show that this map is even more accurate than we are at the moment prepared to accept.8
After the American academic press had reported on the map, it also came to the attention of Charles Hapgood, a professor of history at Keene State University in New Hampshire. He got hold of a copy and began to analyze it thoroughly, together with his students. The results of this joint work took the form of a scientific publication, whose conclusions are revealed in its foreword:
This book contains the history of the discovery of the first solid proof that an advanced people was far superior to all other human groups of which history tells us…. It seems incredible, but the proofs show quite clearly that some ancient people or other mapped the coastline of Antarctica at a time when its coasts were free of ice. It is equally clear that this people must have had access to navigational instruments in order to determine longitude in a way which was far superior to anything we knew of until the middle of the 18th century. Until now scholars have dismissed such claims as myth, but here before us are the indisputable proofs.9
On July 6, 1960, Harold Z. Ohlmeyer, then head of the U.S. Air Force Department, which was involved in mapping Antarctica, wrote to Professor Charles Hapgood:
The coastline [on the Piri Reis map] must have been mapped before the Antarctic was covered in ice. The ice in this region is nowadays roughly a mile thick. We have absolutely no idea how the data on the Piri Reis map can be reconciled with the geographic knowledge of 1513.10
Professor Hapgood and his students worked on the Piri Reis map for two years. What grid of coordinates had the Turk used? Where was the reference point for these coordinates? It soon became clear that this had to be in Egypt, in Alexandria to be precise. Now Piri Reis had obviously taken account of the globe-shape of the earth—but how? It turned out that he must have used a system of trigonometry (triangulation). But where did he get this from?
The Greek Eratosthenes (died 275 BC) was a known map-maker of antiquity. He had even been director of the Alexandria library under Ptolemy III. He also wrote three books about cartographic measurements (Geographika). But it was clear that Eratosthenes had not used trigonometry in his maps. Professor Hapgood and his students were soon convinced that the map-maker responsible for the original upon which Piri Reis drew, “had access to a more advanced science than the ancient Greeks.”11The maps and documents which the Turk used must come from scientific sources that were active in a far-distant past.
Professor Hapgood and his team were soon able to draw up precise comparative tables between the Piri Reis map and modem maps. The discrepancies are small, and in many cases practically non-existent. This is quite astonishing. How on earth can the coastlines of Antarctica, together with its offshore islands, which have lain under an armor plating of ice for millennia, come to be on an old map? And so accurately that comparison with the most up-to-date maps reveals hardly any, or even, in many places, no discrepancy? A miracle? But miracles have some basis in fact.
And yet in spite of all its accuracy there is something wrong with the Piri Reis map, which nothing could really explain. Hapgood said of this: “Parts of the
Caribbean on the Piri Reis map presented us with the greatest difficulties. They don’t seem to fit in to the rest of the picture.”12 The map shows only the eastern coast of Cuba. The whole western side is missing. Instead, something is attached to the western side that cannot be Cuba, and yet is twice as big as the Caribbean islands of today. Hapgood said of this: “Strange to say there exists on the Piri Reis map a complete, western coastline where this island is in reality truncated.”13 It is obvious that Piri Reis had problems with Cuba, for he also gave the island the wrong name: Espaniola. Columbus did not name Cuba “Espaniola,” but called its neighboring islands, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, “Hispaniola.” How did this glaring mistake find its way in to the otherwise perfect map? Professor Hapgood suspects that Piri Reis used a very ancient map on which Cuba was drawn differently than it is today, but that he also had a Columbus map, or—as Piri Reis says in his book Bahriye—he asked a sailor who had taken part in Columbus voyage of discovery. The mistake with Cuba could have arisen through confusion between the Columbus map (and/or the conversation with the sailor) on the one hand, and the old map from an unknown source on the other.
That may be true. But what did the original, ancient map—which might well have come from the library at Alexandria—have in the place of Cuba? How does someone like Piri Reis come to make such a mess of the Caribbean island of Cuba, yet get the coastline of Antarctica so exact? Something else, probably a large island, must no doubt have been on the unknown original. Could it have been Atlantis?
Our current state of knowledge is unable to answer this. A few indications, though, can give us pause for thought. Columbus named his newly-discovered land “Hispaniola,” but the native Indians called it “Quisqueya” or “Mother of Lands.”14 Was this a reference to ancient tradition? In the Greek version of the Atlantis legend, Plato calls it “Polis Atlantis” or “City of Atlas.”
Strangely enough, this same name appears in several stories from Central America. That mysterious realm of Tula, which the Mayans speak of, was once called “Izmachi” and still longer ago Aztlan’. Joachim Rittstig, former principal of the German School in El Salvador, and expert in the Mayan calendar, wrote a booklet which made astonishing links between Atlantis and the Indian cultures of Central America.15 According to his research, it can be clearly seen from Mayan texts that there was a city named Aztlan in 12901 BC, in what is now Guatemala. It is even given an exact geographical location: 15° 33–5’ North; 890° 05.5’ West. I am not in a position to judge whether Rittstig’s conclusions are right in all respects, and I also know that there were not yet any Mayans around in 12901 BC. But that is not the end of the matter: tribes change their names, and sometimes carry with them memories of traditions which are millennia old.
In the (later) Mayan cities, sculptures were made which are still cause for wonder, and which no Mayan expert understands. Some prime examples of these stand in the ancient Mayan metropolis of Copan in Honduras. The more one looks at these curious steles and “anthropomorphic structures,” the more one thinks of an ur-ancient, technical civilization. These figures were no doubt immortalized in stone by a society which had long forgotten how such technical mysteries once functioned. The important thing was that they were connected to the gods. Even the carving on the world-famous grave-slab of Palenque (Mexico), which experts believe belonged to the Mayan ruler Pacal, belongs to this type. The view of various students of ancient America that such representations are of ominous “cosmic monsters”16 has no helpful or sensible bearing on the grave-stone of Palenque.17
We really shouldn’t forget that even the well-known word “Aztec” comes from “Aztlan.” The “people of Aztlan,” the forefathers of the Aztecs, are said to have originally lived on an island.18 And the Spanish monk Fray Diego Durin writes in his History of the Indian Lands of New Spain that the tribes are said to have taken refuge in the caves of “Aztlan and Tecolhuacan” after a terrible catastrophe. Their original homeland had been Aztlan.19
Although I don’t want to go searching for Atlantis, I wouldn’t mind betting that it lay somewhere in the Caribbean region. Plato certainly started something with his Atlantis story. Around about 3,600 books have been written about it.20 This seemingly endless theme stimulates much debate and excites a lot of interest. No doubt people will speculate about where Atlantis was until it is located, but there is one thing which is quite certain from a geological perspective. Atlantis cannot have “gone under,” in the sense of simply sinking under the waves. The geologist Dr. Johannes Fiebag explains why:
A comparison between the sea-floor and the land reveals a fundamental difference between them. The sea-floor is generally composed of very flat plates, while the continents in contrast are vast blocks which float on the so-called asthenosphere. Wherever a subduction zone can be observed in the border region between continent and ocean, one finds that the sea-floor sinks below the continent. This is because the sea-floor consists mainly of basalt, while the continents are generally of granite material and sediment. Basalt has a higher specific weight than gravity, which is why the heavier ocean plates always sink down and the continents, floating like an iceberg on the water in the asthenosphere, never do. This would be absolutely, physically impossible. A continent like Atlantis cannot sink. It is prevented from doing so by its specific weight.21
In spite of this clear, scientific perspective, Atlantis has vanished from the face of the earth, “sunk into the depths” as Plato said. Now a land does not have to sink for the waves to cover it—this can occur when the sea-level rises. And no one disputes that this is what happened when the glaciers melted at the end of the last Ice Age. But the rise in sea-level took place slowly, and not “in a single terrible night” (Plato). The technically advanced inhabitants of Atlantis would have been able to save themselves in good time by taking to ships—unless of course a cosmic catastrophe had compounded the one caused by melting ice; or unless such a catastrophe, perhaps an asteroid hitting the earth, had started an immense tidal wave, which in turn had led to the ice melting. Nowadays we have data that clearly confirms that some huge catastrophe must have happened in mankind’s past.
• Geologists discovered ocean corals on Hawaii at a height of 1,000 feet (300m), which must have been deposited there by a tidal wave.22
• Around 11,400 years ago, temperatures on earth rose by 7 degrees within one decade: “In 1993 samples taken from drillings into Greenland ice revealed, surprisingly, that the Ice Age did not gradually fade out, but ended suddenly.”23
• In the past 67 years, astronomers have discovered a total of 108 small planets which have passed close to the earth. One of these, named XFII, will come within a mere million miles on October 26, 2028. Any impact of an asteroid on the surface of the ocean would cause a tidal wave. “Several thousand kilometers of coastline would be flooded, innumerable cities would be transformed into muddy devastation.”24
I live in a generation which regards a possible climatic catastrophe as a serious possibility. The so-called “greenhouse effect” is meant to spread over the globe and bring about a rise in temperatures. Man is to blame for this, for he produces the dangerous carbon dioxide gas (CO2). Whoever does not go along with this view of impending doom is held to be irresponsible and unreasonable. Never mind that 81 percent of all American climatologists view the greenhouse effect in a quite different way, based on convincing data. The world of ideological misinformation carries on regardless. Computers are fed false data “which is based on obscure simulation models.”25 Fairly little of what climate researchers deign to tell us is accurate. Too many of these environmentalists work according to the principle of “mega-garbage in, mega-garbage out.”
And they are even paid well for doing it. Everything is possible in politics!
These people are clearly lacking in historical awareness. No one can seriously dispute that northern Europe was shrouded in an Ice Age 10,000 years ago. There are lumps of stone lying around in the landscape to prove it—known in geology
as “erratic blocks”—which arrived on the backs of glaciers. What was it that led then, and in many previous temperature changes, to abrupt rises in temperature, and subsequent Ice Ages?
Plato got it right. There were periodic devastations, particularly in coastal regions, either with or without human help. Now I am as concerned as the next man to make sure we keep our world clean. But I object to a paralyzing, “no-future” mentality; which through lack of knowledge of the earth’s history invokes a drama of guilt, even of original sin. This is a drama, rather, that has already been played out many times, and not one caused by the politically correct flavor of the moment.
The sea-level did rise, and catastrophes did occur. We have a Piri Reis map with an ice-free Antarctic to prove it. And off Okinawa Island in Japan lie ancient structures under the water. You may also have heard that the Sahara was once a fertile garden—and it doesn’t really matter which witness I call on to support the claim: whether the Greek geographer Strabo (roughly 62 BC to AD 26); the Roman historian Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (AD 61–113); the Greeks Hesiod, Herodotus or Hecataios (550–480 BC); Diodorus of Sicily (1st century BC); or the more ancient Phoenician Sanchuniathon (about 1250 BC). Whether I quote the Bible’s 10 antediluvian patriarchs or the ancient Babylonian list of kings, or ancient Indian and Tibetan texts, it all comes to the same thing in the end. All of them give accounts of events which occurred 10,000 years and more ago. I noted in the Preface that this book was not about Greek history but about Greek stories. These stories are evidently much older than the research sets out, although they cannot at present be dated. But many of the events described are connected in some way with high technology in antiquity. Apollo’s flying chariot or the robot Talos, patrolling Crete, are just two examples. But high technology in antiquity does not sit well with the people of the Stone Age. Hence my case: the gods were alien astronauts.
Odyssey of the Gods Page 18
