"Piri Reis had probably come into possession of charts once located in the Library of Alexandria, the well-known most important library of the ancient times".

According to Hapgood's reconstruction, copies of these documents and some of the original source charts were transferred to other centers of learning, and among them to Constantinople. Then in 1204, year of the fourth crusade, when the Venetians entered Constantinople, those maps begun to circulate among the European sailors.

After a long study, Mallery discovered the projection method used. To check out the accuracy of the map, he made a grid and transferred the Piri Reis map onto a globe: the map was totally accurate. He stated that the only way to draw map of such accuracy was the aerial surveying: but who, 6000 years ago, could have used airplanes to map the earth??

The Hydrographic Office couldn't believe what they saw: they were even able to correct some errors in the present days maps!!

The precision on determining the longitudinal coordinates, on the other hand, shows that to draw the map it was necessary to use the spheroid trigonometry, a process supposedly not know until the middle of 18th century.

The way the Piri Reis map shows the Queen Maud land, its coastlines, its rivers, mountain ranges, plateaus, deserts, bays, has been confirmed by a British-Swedish expedition to Antarctic (as said by Olhmeyer in his letter to Hapggod); the researchers, using sonar and seismic soundings, indicated that those bays and rivers etc, were underneath the ice-cap, which was about one mile thick.

Charles Hapggod, in 1953, wrote a book called "Earth's shifting crust: a key to some basic problems of earth science", where he made up a theory to explain how Antarctic had been ice-free until year 4000 BC.

The theory summing up is as follows:

"The reason Antarctic was ice-free, and therefore much warmer, it is to be found in the fact that, at one time, its location wasn't the south pole. It was located approximately 2000 miles further north. Hapgood says this "would have put it outside the Antarctic Circle in a temperate or cold temperate climate.

"The reason why the continent moved down to its present location has to be found in a mechanism called "earth-crust-displacement". This mechanism, not to be confused with the plate-tectonics or the continental drift, is one whereby the lithosphere, the whole outer crust of the earth "may be displaced at times, moving over the soft inner body, much as the skin of an orange, if it were loose, might shift over the inner part of the orange all in one piece".

This theory was sent to Albert Einstein, which answered to Hapgood in very enthusiastic terms. Though geologists did not seem to accept Hapgood's theory, Einstein seemed to be as much open as Hapgood saying:

"In a polar region there is a continual deposition of ice, which is not symmetrically distributed about the pole. The earth's rotation acts on these unsymmetrically deposited masses, and produces a centrifugal momentum that is transmitted to the rigid crust of the earth. The constantly increasing centrifugal momentum produced in this way will, when it has reached a certain point, produce a movement of the earth's crust over the rest of the earth's body..."

~Einstein's foreword to "Earth's shifting crust"

In fact Piri Reis himself admitted he based his map on way older charts; and those older charts had been used as sources by others who have drawn different maps still of great precision.

Impressive is the "Dulcert's Portolano", year 1339, where the latitude of Europe and North Africa is perfect, and the longitudinal coordinates of the Mediterranean and of the Black sea are approximated of half degree.

An even more amazing chart is the "Zeno's chart", year 1380. It shows a big area in the north, going up till the Greenland; Its precision is flabbergasting. "It's impossible" says Hapgood "that someone in the fourteenth century could have found the exact latitudes of these places, not to mention the precision of the longitudes..."

Another amazing chart is the one drawn by the Turkish Hadji Ahmed, year 1559, in which he shows a land stripe, about 1600 Km. wide, that joins Alaska and Siberia. Such a natural bridge has been then covered by the water due to the end of the glacial period, which rose up the sea level.

Oronteus Fineus was another one who drew a map of incredible precision. He too represented the Antarctic with no ice-cap, year 1532

In his book, "Fingerprints of the Gods", Graham Hancock presents strong evidence that Antarctica was charted long ago by unknown people, when temperatures were much warmer. He cites a number of old maps, such as the one drawn by Oronteus Finaeus in 1531, reproduced here. Experts examined the original and its age was verified. It was made in the 1500s--three centuries before Antarctica was allegedly even sighted, much less documented. The map is startlingly accurate, depicting ice-free mountain ranges, a South Pole that's just about dead on and the Ross Sea as it would look without the ice shelf. You can even see Ross Island. How could someone draw such a map more than 200 years before Capt. James Cook even sailed south of the Antarctic Circle? Hancock's answer is that it was actually mapped long ago, perhaps thousands of years earlier, and Finaeus merely copied those ancient sources.

There are maps showing Greenland as two separated islands, as it was confirmed by a polar French expedition which found out that there is an ice cap quite thick joining what it is actually two islands.

When human beings were supposed to live in a primitive manner, someone "put on paper" the whole geography of the earth. And this common knowledge somehow fell into pieces, then gathered here and there by several people, who had lost though the knowledge, and just copied what they could find in libraries, bazaars, markets and about all kind of places.

Hapggod made a disclosure which amazingly lead further on this road: he found out a cartographic document copied by an older source carved on a rock column, China, year 1137. It showed the same high level of technology of the other western charts, the same grid method, the same use of spheroid trigonometry. It has so many common points with the western ones that it makes think more than reasonably, that there had to be a common source: could it be a lost civilization, maybe the same one which has been chased by thousands years so far?

 Summary

The Piri Re'is map is often exhibited in cases seeking to prove that civilization was once advanced and that, through some unknown event or events, we are only now gaining any understanding of this mysterious cultural decline. The earliest known civilization, the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, appear out of nowhere around 4,000 B.C. but have no nautical or maritime cultural heritage. They do, however, speak reverently of ancestral people who were like the "gods" and were known as the Nefilim.

Here is a summary of some of the most unusual findings about the map:

Scrutiny of the map shows that the makers knew the accurate circumference of the Earth to within 50 miles.

The coastline and island that are shown in Antarctica must have been navigated at some period prior to 4,000 B.C. when these areas were free of ice from the last Ice Age.

The map is thought to be one of the earliest "world maps" to show the Americas

Early scholars suggested that it showed accurate latitudes of the South American and African coastlines - only 21 years after the voyages of Columbus! (And remember, Columbus did NOT discover North America - only the Caribbean!)

Writing in Piri Re'is own hand described how he had made the map from a collection of ancient maps, supplemented by charts that were drawn by Columbus himself. This suggests that these ancient maps were available to Columbus and could have been the basis of his expedition.

The "center" of the source map projected from coordinates in what is now Alexandria - the center of culture and home of the world's oldest and largest library until its destruction by Christian invaders.