From Atlantis to the Sphinx (15 page)

In 1966, an American professor of the history of science named Charles H. Hapgood caused widespread controversy with a book called
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
. The reason becomes clear from the title of his final chapter: ‘A Civilisation that Vanished’, which begins:

The evidence presented by the ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any known cultures, of a true civilisation, of an advanced kind, which either was localised in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a
worldwide
culture. This culture, at least in some respects, was more advanced than the civilisations of Greece and Rome. In geodesy, nautical science, and mapmaking it was more advanced than any known culture before the 18th century of the Christian Era. It was only in the 18th century that we developed a practical means of finding longitude. It was in the 18th century that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Not until the 19th century did we begin to send out ships for exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic Seas and only then did we begin the exploration of the bottom of the Atlantic. The maps indicate that some ancient people did all these things.

It was unfortunate for Hapgood that in the following year, 1967, these same ancient maps figured prominently in a book called
Chariots of the Gods?
by Erich von Daniken, whose purpose was to demonstrate that they proved the earth had been visited in remote ages by visitors from outer space. How otherwise, Daniken asked, could ancient man have accurately plotted the coast of South America, and the North and South Poles, unless they had seen them from the air? Von Daniken’s many inaccuracies, and the sensational nature of his theories, caused a violent reaction among serious scholars, who decided that the whole thing was a bubble of absurdity. And as Daniken’s inaccuracies were exposed (for example, multiplying the weight of the Great Pyramid by five), the idea gradually got around that the whole question of the ‘maps of the ancient sea kings’ was an exploded myth.

This was totally untrue. More than a quarter of a century after its publication, the evidence of Hapgood’s book remains as solid and as unshaken as ever.

In September 1956, Hapgood had been deeply involved in the study of another mystery, that of the great Ice Ages, when he heard of an intriguing puzzle that sounded as if it might have some bearing on his enquiries. On 26 August 1956, there had been a radio discussion of an ancient map known as the Piri Re’is map, which had been the property of a Turkish pirate who had been beheaded in 1554. A panel of respectable academics and scientists had supported the view that this map appeared to show the South Pole
as it had been before it was covered with ice.

The controversy had arisen because earlier that year, a Turkish naval officer had presented the US Navy Hydrographic Office with a copy of the Piri Re’is map, whose original had been found in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul in 1929. It was painted on parchment and dated 1513, and showed the Atlantic Ocean, with a small part of the coast of Africa on the right, and the whole coast of South America on the left. And, at the bottom of the map, what looked like Antarctica.

The map was passed on to the Hydrographic Office’s cartographic expert, W. I. Walters, who in turn had shown it to a friend named Captain Arlington H. Mallery, who studied old Viking maps. It was after he had studied the map at home that Mallery made the astonishing statement that he believed it showed the coast of Antarctica as it had been before it was covered by thick ice. It appeared to show certain bays in Queen Maud Land as they had been before they were frozen over. In 1949 an expedition mounted by Norway, Sweden and Britain had taken sonar soundings through the ice—which in places was a mile thick—and discovered these long-vanished bays.

It was amazing enough that a sixteenth-century map should show Antarctica, which had not been discovered until 1818, but that it should show Antarctica as it had been in prehistoric times seemed preposterous. Indignant scholars had said as much, which is why the panel of experts had gathered at Georgetown University, in Washington DC, to defend Mallery. All this excited Hapgood, for he had been arguing that the polar ice caps had built up fairly quickly—over thousands rather than millions of years—and that they caused the earth to wobble and the continents to move around. He had gone on to suggest that great masses of dislodged ice caused major catastrophes, and that the last of these catastrophes had occurred about fifteen thousand years ago, when Antarctica was 2,500 miles closer to the equator.

Hapgood contacted Captain Mallery, who impressed him as sincere and honest. He learned from him that the Library of Congress had already possessed facsimiles of the Piri Re’is map even before the officer brought a copy to the Hydrographic Office, and that it possessed many more such maps. They were called portolans—meaning ‘from port to port’—and were used by mariners in the Middle Ages. And Hapgood was startled to learn that these maps had been known to scholars for centuries, but that no one had paid much attention to them. He thereupon decided to involve his students at Keene State College, New Hampshire, in a full-scale study of the maps.

Why had no one paid much attention to them? To begin with, because they had been made by medieval mariners, and were assumed to be full of errors and inaccuracies. Why take the trouble to compare them with more modern maps?

But at least one scholar—E. E. Nordenskiold, who compiled an atlas of portolans in 1889—was convinced that they were based on charts that were far more ancient than the Middle Ages. They were too accurate to have been drawn by medieval sailors. Moreover, charts dating from the sixteenth century showed no sign of development from those of the fourteenth century, which sounded as if both were based on older maps. Moreover, Nordenskiold also noted that the portolans were more accurate than the maps of the great geographer and astronomer Ptolemy, who was active in Alexandria around AD 150. Was it likely that ordinary seamen could surpass Ptolemy, unless they had ancient maps to guide them?

Hapgood’s students decided that the simplest way of attacking the problem would be to put themselves in the position of the original mapmakers (or, in some cases, mapmaker—for it often looked as if many later maps had been based on the same original chart). As everyone knows, the first problem in creating a map is that the world is a globe, and a flat piece of paper is bound to distort its proportions. In 1569, Gerald Mercator solved the problem by ‘projecting’ the globe on to a flat surface, and dividing it up into latitude and longitude, the method we still use. But this is because we know the whole globe. How would an ancient mapmaker, who knew perhaps only his own country, go about it?

The sensible way, the students decided, would be to choose some centre for the map, draw a circle around it, then subdivide this circle into various segments, like a cake—sixteen seemed to make sense. Then if they had to extend beyond the circle, they would probably stick squares on the edge of every ‘slice’.

Piri Re’is had admitted that he had combined twenty maps together, and he had often allowed them to overlap—or fail to overlap. So he had shown the Amazon river twice, but left out a 900-mile stretch of the coastline of South America. Hapgood and his students had—so to speak—to reason their way back to the original twenty maps.

The first question was: where was the original ‘centre’? Long study left them to, conclude that it was off the map, but that it was probably in Egypt. Alexandria seemed the obvious choice. Hapgood involved a friend who was a mathematician, to try to find the answer by trigonometry (fortunately, he had not been told that experts thought the charts were not based on trigonometry). It took three years to find the solution. When it finally became clear that the place they were looking for had to be situated on the Tropic of Cancer, they realised that only one ancient city seemed to fit the requirements—Syene, now known as Aswan, the site of the modern dam.

Syene, in upper Egypt, has one interesting distinction; it was the place from which the Greek scholar Eratosthenes, head of the Library of Alexandria, had worked out the size of the earth around 200 BC.

Eratosthenes happened to hear that on 21 June every year, the sun was reflected at the bottom of a certain deep well in Syene—that is, it was directly overhead, so towers did not cast a shadow. But in Alexandria they did. All he had to do was to measure the length of a shadow in Alexandria at midday on 21 June, and work out from that the angle at which the sun’s rays were striking the tower. This proved to be 7½ degrees. And since the earth is a globe, then the distance from Syene to Alexandria must be 7½ degrees of the earth’s circumference. Since he knew the distance from Syene to Alexandria was 5000 stadia (or 500 miles), the rest was easy: 7½ goes into 360 forty-eight times, so the circumference of the earth must be 500 times 48—24,000 miles. (As we have seen, it is actually closer to 25,000, but Eratosthenes was amazingly close.)

Now, Eratosthenes had made a small error, and increased the circumference of the earth by 4½ degrees. Hapgood discovered that if he allowed for this error, Piri Re’is’s map became even more accurate. This made it virtually certain that the map was based on ancient Greek models after Eratosthenes.

But, reasoned Hapgood, when the geographers of Alexandria made their maps, it is unlikely that they sailed off to look at the various places they were mapping. They almost certainly used older maps—and
then
introduced the error. So the older maps must have been even more accurate than those of Alexandria.

As we saw in the last chapter, a tutor of one of the late Ptolemies, Agatharchides of Cnidus, was told that the base of the Great Pyramid was an eighth of a minute of a degree in length. And from this it is possible to work out that the pyramid builders knew that the circumference of the earth was just under 25,000 miles, which is even more accurate than the estimate of Eratosthenes. This evidence leaves us in no doubt that the ancient Egyptians not only knew that the earth was a globe, but knew its size to within a few miles.

Clearly, this would seem to indicate one of two things: either the Egyptians had a navy capable of circumnavigating the globe, or they had access to information from someone who
did
possess such a navy. (The third possibility—astronauts from the stars—seems, on the whole, rather lower on the scale of probability than the other two.) But we have already seen that one of the first pharaohs to possess a navy was Snofru, father of Cheops, and there would hardly have been time for his ships to sail around the earth and map it in detail before the Pyramid (with its boat pits) was built. Margaret Murray points out that some of the pre-dynastic people of Egypt, the Gerzeans (around 3500 BC) represented ships in their pottery decorations; but these ships have banks of oarsmen, and it seems unlikely that the Gerzeans (possibly Cretans) rowed around the world. So we are left with the possibility that there were seafarers who crossed the oceans long before dynastic Egypt.

How
long before? The Piri Re’is map of Queen Maud Land, at the South Pole, shows bays before they were covered with ice, and Hapgood estimated that the last time Antarctica was free of ice was some time before 4000 BC. (Core samples taken by the Byrd Antarctic Expedition of 1949 showed that the last warm period in the Antarctic
ended
then; the indications are that it began about 13,000 BC.) Someone had mapped Antarctica at least six thousand years ago, and possibly long before that. But a map is no use without some kind of writing on it, and the official date for the invention of writing is about 3500 BC (in Sumeria). Moreover, mapmaking is a sophisticated art, requiring some knowledge of trigonometry and geometry. Again, we seem to be positing a highly developed civilisation existing before 4000 BC. And since civilisations take a long time to develop, it seems possible that we are speaking of thousands of years before this date.

In November 1959, Hapgood made an appointment to look at other portolans at the Library of Congress. When he got into the conference room, he was embarrassed to find literally hundreds of maps. He passed days looking over them, and discovered that many of them showed a southern continent. (In fact, Mercator had shown it—but that was only because he believed it was there, not because he knew of it.) When he saw a map drawn by a man called Oronteus Finaeus in 1531, he was suddenly transfixed. This not only showed the
complete
South Pole, as if seen from the air, but looked startlingly like the South Polar continent on modern maps. It showed the same bays without the ice, rivers flowing to the sea, and even mountains that are now buried under the ice.

There was only one problem. Oronteus Finaeus had made Antarctica far too large. Then Hapgood discovered what seemed to be the explanation. For some odd reason, Oronteus Finaeus had drawn a small circle in the middle of his Antarctica and labelled it ‘Antarctic Circle’. The real Antarctic Circle goes
around
Antarctica, in the sea. Then Hapgood realised that the circle he had drawn on his own map to represent the 80th parallel was in the centre of
his
normal-sized version of the Antarctic, just about where Oronteus had drawn his own Antarctic Circle. Obviously, some earlier copyist of the original map had mistaken the 80th parallel for the Antarctic Circle and mis-labelled it; the result of such a mistake would be to make Antarctica about four times its proper size—just as Oronteus Finaeus had done. Hapgood also concluded that the errors in the map showed that Oronteus Finaeus had constructed it out of many smaller overlapping maps. Again, his reasoning pointed to far earlier—and more accurate—maps.

The conclusion seemed to be inescapable. Some mapmaker had drawn Antarctica in the days when it was free of ice. Moreover, the thoroughness of the map showed that the mapmaker had spent some time there. The logical conclusion seemed to be that he was, in fact, an inhabitant of Antarctica in the days when it
was
warm and habitable—and possibly had a navy capable of sailing round the world.