Graham Hancock and the ‘Lost Civilisation’
The continent that dare not speak its name
Graham Hancock’s ‘lost civilisation’ needs to be located somewhere that renders it more-or-less invisible to present day archaeologists. Why? Because if it were just about anywhere in the world as we know it, scholars would have debated the age and achievements of this incredibly early civilisation for many years. This is the advantage of ‘losing’ a civilisation: if it can’t be seen, it can’t be debated by orthodox archaeologists. Fortunately for Hancock and his followers, there was a candidate for the location of this civilisation that is not only inaccessible, but also possesses conditions that would have completely obliterated all traces of it: the place is Antarctica. Not only does the former land surface of Antarctica lie buried beneath thousands of metres of glacial ice, but also the movement of that ice over the millennia will have churned up and shattered any trace of what may once have existed on the surface. It is quite evident from the chronology he proposes that Hancock’s ‘lost’ civilisation is meant to be Atlantis, yet he stops short of naming it. In Fingerprints of the Gods, he mentions it only twice, once to dismiss a mid-Atlantic continent as a geophysical impossibility. He’s right, of course, but this doesn’t stop him from talking about an ice-free Antarctic and initially identifying this with the home of the supposedly missing civilisation.
The problem is that it’s equally a geophysical impossibility for Antarctica to have become covered in ice as little as 12,500 years ago (as Hancock requires). It’s so simple to disprove, too: ice is laid down in annual layers that can be counted, just like tree rings. How many layers can be counted? Hundreds of thousands. Nevertheless, he feels free to ignore this – perhaps he believes that there is some other mechanism that produces these ice layers – and seizes on an idea known as ‘earth crustal displacement’ to explain not only how an ice-free Antarctic might have been possible in the geologically recent past but also how the European Ice Age was caused. The hypothesis suggests that the earth’s crust is poorly attached to the planet’s core and that, for reasons that are not fully understood, can suddenly slip, creating new locations for the poles. The weight of polar ice is one of the causes for these shifts. It almost goes without saying that orthodox geology does not accept this idea. Whilst we now know that the tectonic plates making up the earth’s crust do move, they do so independently of each other, very slowly and never in the catastrophic way suggested by the crustal displacement hypothesis.
Hancock has discovered references in the work of Charles Hapgood, who proposed the crustal displacement hypothesis in the 1950s, to a series of maps that appear to depict an ice-free Antarctic. These maps date from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and, if the claim that they accurately depict an Antarctic continent- ice-free or otherwise- is correct, they are remarkable, as Antarctica was not discovered until the 1820s. It is therefore important to examine the claims in detail.
The ‘Piri Re’is map’ (1513)
The earliest of the maps is one well known in the fringe literature: that drawn by Piri Re’is dated to the month of Muharrem 919 AH (corresponding to spring 1513 CE). Piri Re’is was an admiral of the Turkish navy and this map, showing the Atlantic Ocean, West Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and lands on the western side of the Ocean, seems to have been based on twenty different maps. One of them has been thought to be a copy of the lost map made by Christopher Columbus, as Piri’s own annotations claim as much. The map was rediscovered by the Director of National Museums, Halil Etem Edhem (1861-1938), when the Topkapi Serail Palace in Istanbul was being converted into a museum in 1929. The map was subsequently studied by a prominent German orientalist, Paul Kalhe (1875-1964), who reported on it at the eighteenth Congress of Oriental Studies in Leiden in 1931.
It
was drawn on camel skin parchment, using nine different colours
of ink; it is 860 mm tall, 610 mm wide at the top (north) and 410
mm wide at the base (south). There is evidence along the top edge
that another strip of parchment, which would probably have shown
the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland, has been
lost. The eastern section of the map has also been torn away,
leaving a ragged edge, although the change in width from north to
south is a product of the natural shape of the skin. It is
illustrated with a number of ships, most of which are Portuguese
caravels, parrots (referred to to as ‘tuti
birds’, depicted on the island of Antilles) and
mythical images. 117 place-names are shown on the map, most of
which are typical of late medieval portolan charts and easily
identifiable.
Portolans were developed in the late Middle Ages as mariners’ charts of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic coasts of Europe, based on the use of the magnetic compass and dead reckoning to calculate longitude. As the European nations began to explore the rest of the world, so the newly acquired information was added to these types of map. Like other portolans, the surviving part of Piri Re’is’s 1513 map has a network of lines radiating from five circular patterns of wind or compass roses; these so-called rhumb lines show various compass directions and prevailing winds. A typical feature of this sort of map is the depiction of the recently discovered New World at a larger scale than the Old World. The effect of this is to displace many coastal features farther north and south than their correct latitudes. The number of compass roses is evidence that the original map depicted the whole world as the standard portolan chart has seventeen such roses. The remaining twelve would have been on the now lost sections.
There are also thirty legends around the map, twenty-nine in Turkish and one in Arabic, the latter identifying the mapmaker and dating it. The Turkish legends give details about the people, animals, minerals and curiosities of the New World. In the Turkish legend detailing his sources, written over South America, Piri states “This section describes the way in which this map was executed. No such map existed in our time. Your humble servant is its author and brought it into being. It is based mainly on twenty charts and mappae mundi, one of which was drawn in the time of Alexander the Great, and is known to the Arabs as Caferiye. This map is the results of comparison with eight such Caferiye maps, one Arab map of India and China and also the map of the western land drawn by Columbus; such that this map of the seven seas is as accurate and reliable as the latter map of this region.’ In his own words – which most of the ‘fringe’ writers do not quote – Piri specifically denies that it is a copy of an ancient map and states that it is his own composition. Only Hapgood and his followers see value in this statement: Hapgood believed that Piri had miscombined several separate maps of South America and Antarctica. Only this way could he explain why Piri’s map is not an accurate depiction of these continents.
On the map, the shape and orientation of Hispaniola is similar to the depiction of Cipango (Japan) on portolans; it was one of the places Columbus had hoped to reach on his first voyage. When he discovered Hispaniola during his first voyage, he believed that he had reached Cipango. Cuba is also shown as part of the mainland, as Columbus believed that it was a great cape projecting east from Asia. The placenames recorded by Piri on this section of the mainland derive from Columbus’s second voyage and clearly identify the land as Cuba. These points demonstrate the map’s close connection with Christopher Columbus, supporting statements by Piri that he copied a map by Columbus. The Piri Reis Map displays the earliest and most rudimentary cartography of the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba.