Possible orgins of Atlantis myth!12:28 Sep 21 2008
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The lost city of Atlantis…..it’s a name that has provoked Myths, stories, numerous archaeological searches, films and countless books. This is a story about one such book, a book that might very well have it’s theories correct simply due to the sheer amount of evidence, and do you want to know the really intriguing thing I found about this story…Charles Hapgood wasn’t even looking for a unknown mystery to solve!!
In his fascinating and provocative book Charles Hapgood uses ancient maps as evidence for the existence, many thousands of years ago, of an advanced worldwide civilization. The maps, long known to scholars, include the Piri Reis Map that shows Antarctica, the Hadji Ahmed map, the Oronteus Finaeus and other remarkable maps and charts. According to Hapgood, the mapmakers responsible for the earliest maps must in some ways have been more technically advanced than sixteenth-century Europe and the ancient civilizations of Greece, Egypt and Babylonia.
Not only did they produce fantastically detailed maps, they also appear to have mapped every continent. The Americas were mapped thousands of years before Columbus and Antarctica was mapped when its coasts were free of ice. From the evidence it seems that these people must have lived when the ice age had not yet ended in the Northern Hemisphere and when Alaska was still connected to Siberia by the Pleistocene, ice age “land bridge”, that is, thousands of years before the heyday of the ancient Egyptians.
In 1966 Charles Hapgood a professor of the history of science caused something of a scandal when he published a book entitled ‘ Maps of the ancient sea kings’ for what professor Hapgood is arguing with a logic that was difficult to fault, was that civilization maybe far, far, older than historians now recognize, than as long as 12000 years ago, when man was still a wandering hunter, ancient seafarers may have been sailing across the Atlantic.
These conclusions were not the outcome of wild speculation; they were the logical result of the study of old maps that had been available for centuries.
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 are in their correct longitudes, a remarkable achievement for those days. It was also, for 1513, an astonishingly accurate map of South America and what was even more surprising 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 map maker had been a Turkish pirate named Piri Re’is why had been beheaded in 1554. He had made the interesting statement that he had based his map on 20 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 Museum in Istanbul and there was already a copy in the Library Of Congress. But thus far, know one had paid much attention to it. Walters Decided to try and remedy this and showed a map to his friend, Captain Arlington H. Mallery, a Navigator who was devoting his retirement to studying old maps. Mallery studied the map and agreed that the land shown to the South was Antarctica, what was more; the map had apparently been made before the Antarctic continent was covered with ice. The coast of Antarctica had certainly been covered with ice in the time of Alexander the Great, the last time men could have seen it with out ice was many thousands of years ago, long before the earliest known maritime civilizations. And that could only mean one of two things: either that ships had sailed the seas at a time when, according to historians, our ancestors were living in caves, or what sounded equally outrageous, there had once been a flourishing civilization on Antarctica itself, whose men/women made maps that were copied down through the ages, up to the time of Alexander the Great.
The Piri Re’is map was not the only one examined by Hapgood. Hapgood asked the Library of Congress to allow him to look at all the old maps of the period and was startled to find hundreds of them laid out for his inspection. It was a 1531 map by one Oronteus Finaeus that filled him with a conviction that he made a discovery equal in importance to the Piri Re’is map. It showed the South Pole, which is amazing enough for a date nearly 3 centuries before it’s official discovery. What was positively staggering was that it was a map of the whole Polar Cap as if drawn from the air, showing a remarkable resemblance to the Pole as we know it today and again it seemed to show the South pole before it was covered in ice. Certain mistakes on the map re-appeared in all other contempory maps, suggesting that all of them had been based on some old map, possibly dating back to Alexander the Great. But the 1949 core samples left no doubt that the Antarctic was covered with ice at the time of Alexander, so the original map must have been older.
How much older?? The core samples showed that the last warm period in the Antarctic ended 6000 years ago, or around 4000 BC, so the Antarctic ‘civilization’ must have flourished before this.
And this, of course, suggested the staggering idea, that some worldwide sea faring civilization has existed before Alexander the great and that it disappeared while the civilization of Mesopotamia was still primitive and illiterate. Hapgood points out that we had to wait for the 18th Century to develop an accurate method of measuring longitude and the circumference of the Earth, and until the 19th for the exploration for the Polar Regions. 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.
Have we found the origins of the Atlantis myth, timing is good, what do you think??
Here's some sites where you can gets the maps and have a look for yourself, have fun:)
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