Friday, February 13, 2009

The Piri Reis Map



The Piri Reis map of 1513 seems to depict Atlantis 6000 years ago: STRANGE ARTIFACTS: PIRI REIS MAP.

In 1929, a group of historians found an amazing map drawn on a gazelle skin.

Research showed that it was a genuine document drawn in 1513 by Piri Reis, a famous admiral of the Turkish fleet in the sixteenth century.

His passion was cartography. His high rank within the Turkish navy allowed him to have a privileged access to the Imperial Library of Constantinople.

The Turkish admiral admits in a series of notes on the map that he compiled and copied the data from a large number of source maps, some of which dated back to
the fourth century BC or earlier.

The Controversy

The Piri Reis map shows the western coast of Africa, the eastern coast of South America, and the northern coast of Antarctica. The northern coastline of Antarctica is perfectly detailed. The most puzzling however is not so much how Piri Reis managed to draw such an accurate map of the Antarctic region 300 years before it was discovered, but that the map shows the coastline under the ice. Geological evidence confirms that the latest date Queen Maud Land could have been charted in an ice-free state is 4000 BC.

15 comments:

  1. Cliff, I imagine a large portion of your identity is now wrapped up in prophesying doom, but take some time to look at the issue from other perspectives. Just one point is that solar power in more than half the states in the US (because of the amount of sunny weather vs cloudy) has by means of technological development become cheaper than oil in the last year. Market forces themselves will replace oil in home heating and personal transport before oil gets disastrously expensive, even if you believe in peak oil, which I don't.

    I know I shouldn't bait trolls, but I can't help it.

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  2. FAILING TO ANSWER THE QUESTION

    @ Clifford J. Wirth, Ph.D.:

    Cliff, you originally placed a comment (see OIM post, Celestial Events In The Time of the Iliadon, 2/9/09) on this website making your case for "Peak" oil, undoubtedly because this is the premier ongoing website for Abiotic Oil theory in the world.

    I don't make the above claim lightly.

    The library of Abiotic Oil theory scientific papers, news articles, and geological in situ oil discovery reports is the largest body of material gathered on a single website on the world-wide internet, today.

    I placed a respectful series of comments in response to your original comment in the same thread.

    I asked what theory of oil formation you subscribed to and offered links to a series of prior posts and further comments with accompanying links to a range of authorities backing up the contention that oil is abiotic in origin.

    I politely suggested a dialogue of comments on specific and particular issues we could address.

    Although, I did state the threshold question to address is how oil is formed in the Earth.

    Cliff, you failed to answer, but that could be atributed to a number of reasonable explanations.

    Now, however, I read your above comment, which rather than a follow up to my response and polite request for dialogue, regrettably comes off looking like a drive-by comment, not intended to further a discussion of the issues.

    Your new comment above doesn't add content to your original comment.

    I hope I'm wrong about my assessment. I still invite dialogue, but your failure to answer substantively to my invitation for further dialogue potentially points to several conclusions:

    Cliff, you surely would have read my series of responding comments in the same post as your original comment (that would be human nature to see what kind of rejoinder was made); and hopefully reviewed and evaluated the scientifc evidence offered.

    I was hopeful that your educational background and attainments would incline you to take up the invitation for discussion and dialogue.

    Failure to address any of the topics I raised suggests you don't have an effective way to dispute the scientific basis for Abiotic Oil theory.

    Also, continued refusal to engage in discussion suggests you never were interested in meaningful dialogue and aren't interested in researching the scientific & technological evidence offered on this website.

    Rather, it suggests the possibility that all you are interested in is peddling your "Peak" oil scaremongering.

    The Oil Is Mastery website and particularly this writer don't promote "doom and gloom".

    Why?

    The scientific evidence doesn't support it.

    "Doom and gloom" psychology and those who promote it are regrettable outgrowths of humanity's inward struggle between hope and fear. And the very regrettable fact there are those willing to manipulate and profit from this age old struggle in the mind of Man.

    Again, perhaps, I am being premature, I certainly wouldn't want to close off an opportunity for meaningful dialogue.

    That is a healthy approach for resolving issues.

    I hope you accept my inviation.

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  3. ANCIENT UNDERSTANDINGS AND ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS

    When I read this post, immediately a book I read around 10 years ago came to mind, Fingerprints of the Gods by Grahm Hancock.

    The openning passage from Graham Hancock's website promoting Fingerprints of the Gods:

    "On 6th July 1960 Lt Colonel Harold Ohlmeyer, a United States Airforce Commander, sent a reply to a letter from one Professor Charles Hapgood who had requested his opinion on a feature found on a map of 1513 AD called the Piri Reis Map. Lt Colonel Ohlmeyer's reply was a bombshell. The map, showing the coastline of the east coast of the Americas and the west coast of Africa, the Colonel remarked, also seemed to show the coastline of Queen Maud Land in Antarctica free of ice - a condition it had not been in for some 9000 years!"

    The starting point of the book: "[A] map of 1513 AD called the Piri Reis Map."

    Graham's theory was that there was an ancient civilization of great attainments in the areas of astronomy, architecture, and mathematics.

    Also, as the post and book blurb point out that Antartica was ice free.

    The book was divided roughly into two parts: One part focused on the evidence of an ancient civilization of great attainments that in turn spread advanced learning all over the world, but principally the evidence focussed on Egypt and Meso-America; the second part focussed on the evidence that an ice free Antartica was known to Man.

    Graham's theory for how Antartica was ice free was based on the Piri Reis Map, of course, but also on Siberian paleontology that showed that how quickly the ice age had descended on Siberia (Wooly Mammoths literally died with undigested flowers still in their stomachs) in a flash freeze.

    Controversially, Graham's mechanism for this flash freeze was that the Earth's crust had torn loose and shifted due to ice buildup on the North Pole because it was lopsided and forced a reshifting of the crust on top of the Mantle. This was not a new idea, as early as the 1950's this idea was proposed and no less a scientific luminary as Albert Einstein supported the theoretical possibility of the theory.

    I thought it was an interesting book with provocative conclusions.

    Now, based on my study of the Earth's crust and mantle, I know Graham's thesis of the crust coming loose from the mantle and shifting due to the weight of unevenly distributed ice buildup at the North Pole is fanciful at best and ludicrous at worst.

    The continental crust is rooted deep into the mantel and simply can't "slide" or shift over the mantel in one fell swoop.

    Einstein's endorsement of the hypothesis in the '50s has much less weight in my mind now that I know his scientific achievements were dubious (by the '50s Einstein was looking for ways to get in the news and he had little if any geological knowledge).

    But the questions still remain about the flash frozen Wooly Mammoths and the Piri Reis Map.

    Now, as the post relates the Piri Reis Map was based on earlier source maps. Most, if not all, of these maps have been lost to history.

    Discarding Graham's theory of a shifting crust, what other processes could have caused a situation where Siberia had a temperate climate and, more controversially, Antartica was ice free?

    Two possibilities spring to mind: One possibility is that the axis changed because the weight of the ice shifted the axis of the Earth's orbit without any shifting of crust over mantle; the second possibility is more in line with Velikovsky's ideas, that powerful electrical forces (electric discharges , or electro-gravity) from planets in nearby orbits caused the axis to change.

    A third possibility is that none of the above happened and there is an alternative explanation for the events in question that no one knows or understands.

    Clearly, however, current geology and paleontology climate study provide no convincing answers on how Wooly Mammoths could be flash frozen. Ice ages are currently understood to take long geologic time scales to develop and retreat.

    Only something cataclysmic could have left Wooly Mammmoths flash frozen with undigested flowers in their stomachs. (Some reports place the flowers even in the mammoths' mouths, if memory serves me.)

    To these unsolved mysteries geology and archeology have stood mostly silent.

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  4. I wonder if Atlantis actually exists or existed. It's obviously a well-known myth. Happy (late) Darwin Day, by the way.

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  5. Oh boy, you guys have started something - but before you wander off along tangents, have a very close look at Gavin Menzies' two books 1421 and 1434 - Piri Reis could well have copied from Chinese maps of the period.

    Be careful with using "dates" - radiometric dating is a crock - while almost every physical field has been tested, science has completely ignored the role of electric fields; all experiments are done in the earth's electric field, and this is the one physical field they never tested.

    There are recent papers on this and one is being published in AIG News shortly.

    Getting back to Menzies, the Ming Dynasty Chinese sent fleets all over the world to do astronomical measurements, so why? Not even Menzies has made much of this.

    At about this time the Rome decided to reset the Christian calendar because religious events were not in sync with the dates.

    Choson Annals of Korea show good evidence for the earth having passed through a swarm of meteorites, so in terms of EU theory I would suggest that the Earth careened slightly on its axis to a new celestian orientation, so that navigational assumptions became useless.

    This is enough to get you finding more data on this.

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  6. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY

    I wrote a supportive comment earlier in the comment thread, but I also read the link provided by OilIsMastery, which fils in much more of the story.

    But interestingly enough at the bottom of the linked story there was an assessment that strongly contradicted the assertion that the Piri Reis Map reflected knowledge gained from some lost ancient "super" civilization.

    Rather the assessment acknowledged Piri Reis supreme map making skills, but asserted the knowledge was only contemporary with Piri Reis, and that the Antartic coastline was not accurately depicted.

    I'll let the assessment speak for itself:

    Modern analysis of the Piri Reis map - Surprising Conclusions

    "Apart from its great historic interest, the map has been alleged to contain details no European could have known in the 1500's, and therefore proves the existence of ancient technological civilizations, visits by extraterrestrials, or both.
    In response to people who ask how to explain why the Piri Reis Map shows the coastline of Antarctica accurately, the answer is - it doesn't. It especially doesn't show the subglacial coastline of Antarctica, which corresponds to the existing coastline of Antarctica around most of the continent anyway."

    The Piri Reis Map
    by Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay


    The Map

    "The Piri Reis Map, shown below, is the oldest surviving map to show the Americas. It is not European, surprisingly, but Turkish. It bears a date of 919 in the Moslem calendar, corresponding to 1513 in the Western Calendar..."

    Anyway, this gentlemen has credible evidence and reasoning that explains his position that the map doesn't rely on a "lost" ancient civilization or accurately depict the Antartic coast.

    Readers, you make the call.

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  7. Anaconda,

    Sonchis of Sais said that Atlantis was 11,600 years old.

    I don't know anything about super-technology or extraterrestrials. Yet. LOL.

    Although the ruins of Baalbek seem to be pointing either in the direction of giants or in the direction of advanced technology.

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  8. *snort* Please, it's starting to sound like Stargate: Atlantis.

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  9. Lewis,

    Let me ask you a question for you to think about. Since you are younger, you're probably more imaginative than I am.

    How is it possible that Democritus or Hippolytus could have known that there are planets and moons with no animals, plants, and water on them?

    How it possible they concluded that worlds collide?

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  10. I first heard of the Piri Reis map in Erich von Daniken's book "Chariots of the Gods". Has anything new been established about it since von Daniken's book appeared?

    Concerning the depiction of Antarctica in the map, it was common for mapmakers of the age to add a supposed southern continent often called Terra Australis which was thought to balance the earth. So it may not be Antarctica being depicted at all but some imaginary southern continent.

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  11. @OIM "How is it possible that Democritus or Hippolytus could have known that there are planets and moons with no animals, plants, and water on them?"

    That may not have been the majority view even among the atomists. Here is what Lucretius has to say on the subject:

    http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.2.ii.html

    On the Nature of Things, Book II

    "The seeds together in this world of ours, 'tmust be confessed in other realms there are still other worlds, still other breeds of men,
    and other generations of the wild.
    Hence too it happens in the sum there is no one thing single of its kind in birth, and single and sole in growth, but rather it is
    one member of some generated race,
    among full many others of like kind."

    So Lucretius appears to be arguing that the other worlds are invariably populated. That was a common argument concerning the Plurality of Worlds repeated by Giordano Bruno, et al until the mid 19th century.

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  12. Tom,

    Thx for the headsup on the Lucretius passage.

    How do you think the atomists knew all of that?

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  13. @OIM "How do you think the atomists knew all of that?"

    Well, I don't think it's because they received advance knowledge from an extraterrestrial civilization. They "knew" it by following their basic philosophy to its logical conclusion. Of course, they did not have the means to verify their conclusions.

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