Piri Reis map

Thu Mar 26, 2009 5:56 am » by **Vulcanic**

The Piri Reis map ("Piri" pronounced /piɹi/) is a famous pre-modern 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.

History
The map was discovered in 1929 while Topkapı Palace 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 Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, Turkey, but is not usually on display to the public.

Analysis

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 claims this and other maps support a theory of global exploration by a pre-classical undiscovered civilization. He supports this with an analysis of the mathematics of ancient maps and of their accuracy, which he says surpassed instrumentation available at the time of the map's drafting.

Hapgood argued that owing to the map being assembled from components, the Caribbean section was rotated nearly 90º from the top of South America. He attributed this to either 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", of which other examples are known in maps of the era.

Gregory McIntosh
Gregory McIntosh, a 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 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. Many of the names of ports and geographic points are found in Columbus's written texts.

McIntosh, in comparing the Piri Reis map to several other portolan-style maps of the era, found that

The Piri Reis map is not the most accurate map of the sixteenth century, as has been claimed, there being many, many world maps produced in the remaining eighty-seven years of that century that far surpass it in accuracy. The Ribero maps of the 1520s and 1530s, the Ortelius map of 1570, and the Wright-Molyneux map of 1599 (‘the best map of the sixteenth century’) are only a few better-known examples

Thu Mar 26, 2009 8:03 pm » by **Vulcanic**

allways get pulled back to south pole!

Fri May 18, 2012 8:05 pm » by **Vulcanic**

bump!

Fri May 18, 2012 8:53 pm » by **Perry LaGuardia**

Ancient maps are fascinate me...I live about 40 miles from where the Mappa Mundi is exhibited and I keep promising myself that I will go and see it, Maybe this post will encourage me to make the effort this weekend..

The Mappa Mundi

The Hereford Mappa Mundi is unique in Britain's heritage; an outstanding treasure of the medieval world, it records how thirteenth-century scholars interpreted the world in spiritual as well as geographical terms.

The map bears the name of its author 'Richard of Haldingham or Lafford' (Holdingham and Sleaford in Lincolnshire). Recent research suggests a date of about 1300 for the creation of the map.

Mappa Mundi is drawn on a single sheet of vellum (calf skin) measuring 64" by 52" (1.58 x 1.33 metres), tapering towards the top with a rounded apex. The geographical material of the map is contained within a circle measuring 52" in diameter and reflects the thinking of the medieval church with Jerusalem at the centre of the world.

Superimposed on to the continents are drawings of the history of humankind and the marvels of the natural world. These 500 or so drawings include of around 420 cities and towns, 15 Biblical events, 33 plants, animals, birds and strange creatures, 32 images of the peoples of the world and 8 pictures from classical mythology.

Christopher de Hamel, a leading authority on medieval manuscripts, has said of the Mappa Mundi, '... it is without parallel the most important and most celebrated medieval map in any form, the most remarkable illustrated English manuscript of any kind, and certainly the greatest extant thirteenth-century pictorial manuscript.'

Wed Jul 11, 2012 12:57 am » by **Vulcanic**

Fatdogmendoza wrote:Ancient maps are fascinate me...I live about 40 miles from where the Mappa Mundi is exhibited and I keep promising myself that I will go and see it, Maybe this post will encourage me to make the effort this weekend..

The Mappa Mundi

The Hereford Mappa Mundi is unique in Britain's heritage; an outstanding treasure of the medieval world, it records how thirteenth-century scholars interpreted the world in spiritual as well as geographical terms.

The map bears the name of its author 'Richard of Haldingham or Lafford' (Holdingham and Sleaford in Lincolnshire). Recent research suggests a date of about 1300 for the creation of the map.

Mappa Mundi is drawn on a single sheet of vellum (calf skin) measuring 64" by 52" (1.58 x 1.33 metres), tapering towards the top with a rounded apex. The geographical material of the map is contained within a circle measuring 52" in diameter and reflects the thinking of the medieval church with Jerusalem at the centre of the world.

Superimposed on to the continents are drawings of the history of humankind and the marvels of the natural world. These 500 or so drawings include of around 420 cities and towns, 15 Biblical events, 33 plants, animals, birds and strange creatures, 32 images of the peoples of the world and 8 pictures from classical mythology.

Christopher de Hamel, a leading authority on medieval manuscripts, has said of the Mappa Mundi, '... it is without parallel the most important and most celebrated medieval map in any form, the most remarkable illustrated English manuscript of any kind, and certainly the greatest extant thirteenth-century pictorial manuscript.'

did you ever go see the Mundi map yet? :cheers:

Thu Jul 12, 2012 10:19 am » by **Canubis**

i always liked the Piri Reis map because there are people on Flying carpets!!!!

Thu Jul 12, 2012 7:18 pm » by **Mydogma**

Yep another fine example of our pathetic ego infested elitist controlled education system..how is it our phds haven't come up with reasonable explanations to obvious glaring inconsistancies in their story(cuz that's all it is..their story)...if they can't explain it and it doesn't fit in with their thesis..they put it on a shelf and egnore it as if it doesn't exist...but it does..

Fri Jul 20, 2012 3:35 pm » by **Vulcanic**

Mydogma wrote:Yep another fine example of our pathetic ego infested elitist controlled education system..how is it our phds haven't come up with reasonable explanations to obvious glaring inconsistancies in their story(cuz that's all it is..their story)...if they can't explain it and it doesn't fit in with their thesis..they put it on a shelf and egnore it as if it doesn't exist...but it does..

well said mydogma :flop:

Sat Jul 21, 2012 2:52 am » by **Hurtswhenipee**

Thanks Vulcanic this map is so cool! I wonder how old the information really is!? I wonder all the time how much information was lost due to the Church and other people who thought anything not how "They" thought was heathen or the devil's work. Kind of like the Maya how almost all their books were destroyed. :bang;

Fri Aug 24, 2012 2:59 pm » by **Vulcanic**

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