Piri Reis Map

Surviving fragment of a world map drawn on gazelle skin in 1513 by Piri Reis, an Ottoman admiral and cartographer, and rediscovered in the Topkapi Palace in 1929. Its own marginal notes state that it was compiled from about twenty older charts, one of them attributed to Columbus. Its interest to lost-civilisation writers is the landmass drawn below South America. In 1960 Lieutenant Colonel Harold Z. Ohlmeyer of the US Air Force replied to Charles Hapgood that the coastline resembled the subglacial contour of Queen Maud Land, and Hapgood read that as a survey of Antarctica made before the ice. Cartographers read the same feature as the South American coast bent eastwards to fit the parchment, a common compilation convention of the period, and point out that the map’s Caribbean is badly wrong in ways a globally accurate survey would not be.

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Charles Hapgood · Earth-Crust Displacement · Graham Hancock