Piri Reis map

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The Piri Reis map
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The Piri Reis map

The Piri Reis map (Turkish pronunciation of "Piri" is like "pee-ree") is a famous premodern world map created by 16th century Ottoman-Turkish admiral and cartographer Piri Reis. The map shows part of the western coasts of Europe and North Africa with reasonable accuracy, and the coast of Brazil is also easily recognizable. Various Atlantic islands including the Azores and Canary Islands are depicted, as is the mythical island of Antillia. The map is noteworthy for its depiction of a southern landmass that some controversially claim is evidence for early awareness of the existence of Antarctica.

Contents

[edit] History of the Map

The map was discovered in 1929 while Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, Turkey was being converted into a museum. It is the extant western third of a world map drawn on gazelle skin. The surviving portion primarily details the western coast of Africa and the eastern coast of South America. The map was drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis, a famous admiral of the Turkish fleet, and presented to the Sultan in 1517. Piri Reis stated that the map was based on about twenty charts and mappae mundi. According to Piri these maps included eight Ptolemaic maps, an Arabic map of India, four newly drawn Portuguese maps of their recent discoveries, and a map by Christopher Columbus of the western lands.

The Piri Reis map is currently located in the Library of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, Turkey, but is not usually on display to the public.

[edit] Analysis

[edit] Gregory McIntosh

Gregory McIntosh, an historian of cartography, has examined the Piri Reis map in depth and published his research in the book The Piri Reis Map of 1513 (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2000).

He claims that the depiction of the Caribbean was developed from at least one of Christopher Columbus's maps. Hispaniola is depicted with a north-south axis similar to depictions of Japan on maps of the same era. At the time it was widely believed that the east coast of the Americas was in fact that of Asia. Columbus believed that Japan and Hispaniola were actually the same island and Cuba was part of a mainland. The mainland in the extreme northwest is labeled with place-names from Columbus's voyages along the coasts of Cuba. McIntosh claims the map shows double sets of Virgin Islands because Piri Reis took them from two maps. Finally, many of the names of ports and geographic points are found in Columbus's written texts.

[edit] Charles Hapgood

Charles Hapgood began studying the map in the middle of the 20th Century and published the book Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings in 1966.

Hapgood builds on this claim to support a theory of global exploration by a pre-classical undiscovered civilization. He backs up his claim with analysis of the mathematics of ancient maps and of their accuracy, which surpassed instrumentation available at the time of the map's drafting.

In an earlier publication, The Path of the Pole, not related to his map researches by himself, Hapgood was inclined to the opinion that the Earth's crust has rotated in recent history. The same claim has been advanced by Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock, to support similar beliefs in the existence of civilisations during the last Ice Age. However, he did not dismiss either Continental Drift or changes in the Earth's rotation as possible events to explain the lack of ice at the pole. This is not so much of an Achilles heel as some critics make it to be as the idea of continental drift did not become widely accepted as theory until the 1950s in Europe and the 1960s among North American geologists.

Hapgood argued that owing to the map being assembled from components, the Caribbean section was rotated nearly 90º from the top of South America, perhaps due to copying from a polar projection or to fit in the space available by hinging the map at that location and giving it an "alternate north" which was known of in other maps of the era.

[edit] Others

Gavin Menzies, in his book 1421: The Year China Discovered America puts forward a theory that the southern landmass is indeed the Antarctic coastline and was based on earlier Chinese maps. According to Menzies, Admiral Hong Bao charted the coast over 70 years before Columbus as part of a larger expedition under the famous Chinese explorer and admiral Zheng He to bring the world under China's tribute system. Menzies' theory is systematically discredited in the television documentary also named 1421: The Year China Discovered America.

[edit] Specific Geographical points of contention

[edit] Antarctica

Scholars believe the resemblance of the coastline to the actual coast of Antarctica to be tenuous. For centuries before the actual discovery of Antarctica, cartographers had been depicting a massive southern landmass on global maps based on the theoretical assumption by Europeans that one must exist, if only to balance the landmass of the North. The landmass in question on the Piri Reis map would thus be simply a continuation of this tradition, with its debatable resemblance to the actual coastline being coincidental. It was widely believed that South America and, once its northern coastline was discovered, Australia, must be joined to this land mass, which was thought to be very much bigger than the real Antarctica. This theoretical southern continent, the Great Southern Land or Terra Australis Incognita (literally Unknown Southern Land), in various configurations, was usually shown on maps until the eighteenth century.

An alternate view is that the "Antarctic" coast is simply the eastern coastline of South America skewed to align east-west due to the inaccurate measurement of longtitude or to fit it on the page 1. Close examination of the coastline supports this view, revealing depictions of the basins at the mouth of the Strait of Magellan and the Falkland Islands. 2 The annotations on the map itself, stating that this region is hot and inhabited by large snakes do not fit with the likely climate and fauna in Antarctica in the 1500s. Similarly the map states that "spring comes early" to the islands off the coast, which is true of the Falkland Islands but not of any islands close to the Antarctic mainland.

Hapgood suggests that the Antarctic section of the map was copied at an incorrect scale to the rest of the map and resulted in the distortion and enlargement of the continent on several ancient maps. This would explain why there is no waterway between South America and Antarctica. He suggests several points of continuity between the Piri Reis Map and modern maps of the continent below the ice caps.

Since the Antarctic continent was not officially sighted until 1820 and its full coastline was not known until much later, this claim, if true, requires major revisions to the history of exploration.

Note 1: Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay, The land mass at the bottom is a skewed plot of South America.

Note 2: Diego Cuoghi, Thorough article On Piri Reis and Oronteus maps refuting the Antarctica claims.

[edit] South America

There are many difficulties in the map of South America, including duplication of rivers, and the continent's southern end merging with Antarctica. These problems are explored in detail by Charles Hapgood.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links


Maps, Historical at the Open Directory Project

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