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The Sea Kings of 6000 BC,
by Colin Wilson.
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Thrilling from the word go, even when one is familiar with the beginning bit, due to Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of Gods.
"The story began in 1956, when a cartographer named M. I. Walters, at the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office, found himself looking at a copy of a strange map that had been presented to the Office by a Turkish naval officer. It was obviously very old – in fact, it was dated 919 in the Muslim calendar, which is AD 1513 by Christian reckoning. It was basically a map of the Atlantic Ocean, showing a small part of North Africa, from what is now Morocco to the Ivory Coast, and all of South America. These were in their correct longitudes, a remarkable – in fact, almost unbelievable – achievement for those days, when most maps were laughably crude. (One of the most famous medieval maps shows Italy joined to Spain; another shows the British Isles shaped like a teapot.) It was also, for 1513, an astonishingly accurate map of South America. And what was even more surprising was that it apparently showed Antarctica, which was not discovered until 1818. Oddly enough, it also showed the mid-Atlantic ridge, which seems an unbelievable piece of knowledge for any period before the invention of sonar depth soundings – unless, of course, it had been observed while it was still above water.
"The original mapmaker had been a Turkish pirate named Piri Re’is (Re’is means “admiral”), who had been beheaded in 1554. He had been the nephew of a famous pirate, Kemal Re’is, and had held a high post, equivalent to the governorship of Egypt. Piri Re’is had made the interesting statement that he had based his map on twenty old maps, one of them made by Christopher Columbus and others from the great library of Alexandria, destroyed by invading Arabs in AD 640.
"In fact, the Piri Re’is map had been known since 1929, when it had been discovered in the Topkapi Palace museum in Istanbul, and there was already a copy in the Library of Congress. But thus far, no one had paid much attention to it. ... "
Typical of Europe and migrants there from, presuming they know it all, and anything else from anywhere else is myth, or worse! Experience doesn't teach them any better, either.
Walters took the map to a friend, admiral Mallery, who pointed out that the map showed Antarctica before it was covered by ice, which was long before the time of Alexander the great. Hapgood has a theory about ice ages and earth crust that fitted Antarctica being closer to equator.
But Hapgood discovered more of maps that showed Antarctica correctly without ice sheet, and polar ice cap, and more; this must have been based on even older maps, preceding Alexander the great by several millennia.
Which turns history as presumed by west completely on its head.
"And this, of course, suggested the staggering idea that some worldwide seafaring civilization had existed before Alexander the Great and that it had disappeared while the civilization of Mesopotamia was still primitive and illiterate. This is the suggestion that Hapgood – shunning all academic caution – outlines in his book’s last chapter, “A Civilisation That Vanished.” He points out that we had to wait for the eighteenth century to develop an accurate method of measuring longitude and the circumference of the earth, and until the nineteenth for the exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic. According to Hapgood: “The maps indicate that some ancient people did all these things.” And this civilization disappeared, either in some catastrophe or over a long period of time, and was simply forgotten. If it existed in Antarctica – and possibly the Arctic – then its disappearance is easily explained by the return of the ice cap about six thousand years ago."
"To be fair to von Däniken and The Morning of the Magicians, it must also be admitted that Hapgood’s carefully argued analysis of the portolans does offer some support for the “ancient astronaut” theory. The Oronteus Finaeus map does look as if it has been based on an aerial view. So does the 1550 Hadji Ahmed map of the world seen from above the North Pole. Moreover, it is still difficult to see how the lines and the vast drawings on the desert floor at Nazca could have been drawn by people who were unable to look down on them from the air – although primitive balloons would have been as effective as spacecraft for that purpose."
Again, wonder why Colin Wilson mentions Hapgood but not Graham Hancock.
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December 18, 2021 - December 18, 2021.
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