Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings

This book was out of print for over 20 years. It is finally back based on popular demand. It is the very best book on the market which contains the ancient maps of the world before Christopher Columbus. A map is worth a thousand words. Charles Hapgood has made an excellent job to point out some strange features on Ancient maps. Comparing a set of maps made from Ptolemea (166 AD) to the Middle Ages and the first global maps made by Piri Re'is (A Ottoman admiral), Hadji Ahmed, Oronteaus Finaeus and Mercator, all editing their maps between 1513 and 1560, he (and the reader) notice that Antarctic continent figures almost accuratly on all of them. Giving the example of a Chinese map from the 12th century accuratly depicting the rivers system of the Chinese Empire, he comes to the conclusion that all those people have used copies of ancient maps probably drawn before the Ice Age by an ancient civilisation. Despite the research work, there are some inaccuracies. Talking about Mercator's map, he refers to the Greenwich Meridian. Mercator was living in Antwerp, a city that commanded 40% of Western trade between 1501 and 1557. It was Brussels's harbour, capital of a global empire headed by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, which covered 1/4 of Europe, America and outposts in Northern Africa. There are no reasons whatsoever for Mercator to use the meridian of a secondary rate kingdom of the time, England. Plantin Publishing House from Antwerp annual turnover was equal to one third of England's budget. And England was considered an economical dependency of Flanders: Paxton writes in 1480 that no one could find a managerial job on an English estate if he could not speak Flemish. Furthermore dispute between Greenwich and Paris Meridian was not be settled until recently (18-19th century). Antarctica emerges on the maps in the 16th century during the period of Great Discoveries but never figures before on maps drawn by Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, Indians, civilisations which have written records dating back to the 4th, 3rd and 2nd millennium BC ? Seen the importance of maps for seafaring people like Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks or Romans accurate maps must have been almost magic for them and they would certainly talk about the wonders of those documents, even attribute heavenly origins to them. No ancient world story talks about such items. Renaissance was born by the careful study of Bibles to recover the original text by removing all addition made by copists during the Middle Ages. They made 'genealogy trees' of bible copies in order to recover the original texts. They knew the method. So they would have documented the path used to rebuild the maps based on copies of more ancient maps. But nowhere is such process documented and nowhere are such ancient maps found: Venice, Constantinople, Lisboa, Sevilla nor Antwerp have records of similar activities. What is puzzling also is to see Antartica on all those maps, but never Australia. Should Atlantis have been Antarctica, why should people from Atlantis invade Europe, America, Asia and Africa and never set foot in Australia which was much closer than Europe or Asia. The theory that the crust moved thousand miles is not convincing either. Hapgood wrote his book a few years before the tectonic plate theory was published (early seventies). Since Colombus discovered America, both continents (Europe and America) moved the distance of a soccer field. One soccer field (110 yards) every half-millennium makes a quick move from Antarctica to the South Pole impossible indeed. The Sun swicthed magnetic poles on February 15th, 2001. Did you notice something ? Probably no. It happens every 11,5 years and we have never felt bad about it. So it cannot explain dramatic changes on Earth either. Another fact Hapgood does not talk about is that Columbus was looking for a shortcut to India. When he landed, he baptized the place India. In Sevilla, the organisation in charge of transoceanic shipments was called Casa de Indias. For centuries, Europeans talked about the Indies, separated in West Indies (Carribbean) and East Indies (Asia). When a map shows Cipangu, it was supposed to be Japan as related by Marco Polo and not Cuba. It is only gradually Europeans realized they had discovered another continent they named America after Amerigo Vespucci, an italian explorer. Question remains: Between 1484 and 1509, did somebody go around the South Pole ? And if not, how could maps have physically survived centuries or millennia to reemerge at that time only in Flanders, Italy and Constantinople. And why does it show Antarctica only and never Australia?