PIRI REIS MAP

Opening

In 1513, an Ottoman admiral and cartographer named Piri Reis drew a map of the Atlantic world on parchment. It showed the coast of Europe and Africa on the right, the Atlantic in between, and the coast of South America and the Caribbean on the left. About a third of it survives, and it was lost to view for four centuries until a fragment turned up in the library of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul in late 1929.

The map is real, and it is remarkable: an early world chart drawn by a Turkish seaman, which preserves information from a lost map by Christopher Columbus. In 1966 an American writer, Charles Hapgood, said that it also showed the coast of Antarctica as it was before the ice, which would mean it drew on a lost civilisation's maps. That claim has been taken up by Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock. It is almost certainly wrong, and the way it goes wrong is instructive.

Timeline

1513Piri Reis compiles the map. It is a portolan chart, drawn for navigation with compass roses and a network of windrose lines, with inscriptions mostly in Ottoman Turkish.

1517After the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, Piri Reis presents it to Sultan Selim I. How the sultan used it is unknown, and the map then disappears from the record.

Late 1929Halil Edhem, director of national museums, finds the parchment in a neglected bundle while searching the palace library for maps. The German theologian Gustav Adolf Deissmann had been invited to tour the library and had persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to fund manuscript preservation.

Soon afterwardsThe orientalist Paul Kahle identifies it as Piri Reis's work and links it to a lost Columbus map.

1966Charles Hapgood's Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings promotes the theory that the map shows an ice-free Antarctica. Arlington Mallery, a civil engineer and amateur archaeologist, had also re-plotted the map's points onto a grid.

Key figures

Piri Reis was an Ottoman admiral. He compiled the map from many source charts, among them a Columbus map, and wrote about it in the legends on the map itself.

Halil Edhem found it. Paul Kahle identified its origin and attributed most of the north and west to Columbus. Svat Soucek doubted that, and Gregory McIntosh limited the Columbian material to Cuba, Central America, the Bahamas and Hispaniola.

Charles Hapgood and Arlington Mallery argued for the Antarctica theory. Erich von Däniken, Donald Keyhoe and Graham Hancock repeated it in support of ancient astronauts, flying saucers and Atlantis.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: the surviving third of the map in the Topkapı Palace, its legends, and Piri Reis's other writing. The legend lists twenty charts and world maps, eight Jaferiyes, an Arabic map of India, four Portuguese maps of Asia and a Columbus map. Scholars debate the number of sources, which some read as 20, 30 or 34, and several are unidentified.

The Caribbean on the map is oddly laid out, with Hispaniola running north to south and Cuba merged into the Central American coast. This is linked to Columbus's belief that he had reached Asia, which is why a Columbus source is widely accepted. The map's Atlantic and South American coasts are relatively good for 1513, but McIntosh holds that it was not the most accurate of its century and was soon surpassed, including by Piri Reis's own 1528 map.

The southern landmass is the disputed part. It is most likely Terra Australis, the theoretical southern continent of Ptolemy's geographic tradition. Cananéia, in Brazil, is the southernmost point identified with certainty, and the claim that the map shows more than Europeans knew depends on subjective visual comparisons with modern maps and has no textual support.

Things you might not know

• Only a third survives. The rest of the world map is lost.
• It carries a lost Columbus map. Its Caribbean section is generally attributed to a map the explorer made, which no longer exists.
• Its monsters are harmless. Karen Pinto notes that the marginal beasts are shown as harmless, a sign that the map had left behind the medieval idea of an impassable ocean.
• Antarctica was last ice-free millions of years ago. Critics say it was over ten million years ago, long before any human civilisation.
• A seismic survey was misread. Hapgood's case relied partly on a 1949 survey that covered far too little area to support it.
• The sultan's use of it is unknown. After 1517 it simply vanishes from history.

Competing explanations

A good early chart with a conjectured south. The strongest reading. The Atlantic and Caribbean come from Columbus and Portuguese sources, and the southern landmass is Terra Australis, a theoretical continent that was expected to exist.

A map of Antarctica. Hapgood's theory. It requires an ice-free Antarctica within human history, which the geology rules out, and it ignores post-glacial rebound. Critics note that Hapgood's dates were wrong and that he ignored post-glacial rebound.

A distorted South American coast. Others see the south as a distorted continuation of the South American coast. Both readings rest on subjective visual comparisons with modern maps.

Later life of the case

The map is held at the Topkapı Palace and is a standard subject in the history of cartography. In popular culture the Antarctica claim has outlived its rebuttal and is still repeated in books and television programmes about ancient astronauts.

Finding

The Piri Reis map is genuine and valuable, and its real interest is as a record of early Atlantic exploration and of a lost map by Columbus. The Antarctica claim is disproved: the ice, the geology and the cartography do not allow it. What remains is a puzzle about its sources, and about how much of the Atlantic coastline came from Columbus and how much from Portuguese charts.

What still will not resolve: the identity of several of the map's source charts, and what happened to the other two-thirds of the map.