Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age
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Charles Hapgood’s classic 1966 book on ancient maps is back in print after 20 years. Hapgood produces concrete evidence of an advanced worldwide civilisation existing many thousands of years before ancient Egypt. He has found the evidence in many beautiful maps long known to scholars. Hapgood concluded that these ancient mapmakers were in some ways much more advanced in mapmaking than any people prior to the 18th century. It appears they mapped all the continents. The Americas were mapped thousands of years before Columbus. Antarctica was mapped when its coasts were free of ice. There is evidence that these people must have lived when the Ice Age had not yet ended in the Northern Hemisphere and when Alaska was still connected with Siberia by the Pleistocene, Ice Age ‘land bridge’…. More >>
“Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings”, Hapgood. I read this book when it was first published…must have been 30 years ago. What I remember most was an ancient map of tne continent of Antartica, published in 1509, but with an outline amazingly close to what the continent was recently shown to be late in the 20th Century. The map was published by a French cartographer who had no notion of Antartica. In addition to its inexplicable similarity to the Antartica that we know, the margins of the continent are shown to be free of ice, and across this landscape rivers flowing from the frozen center down to the sea. It has always been assumed, I imagine, that Antartica has been covered with its two mile thick ice sheet for millions of years. But last year Discovery magazine reported that a scientist, working in Antartica claimed to have evidence that the southernmost continent had been partially ice free in recent times, recent meaning sometime in the Pleistocene. There is also in this unusual book a strange map of Europe as it might have been seen during the last Ice Age from a vantage point somewhere in space. In this map, also produced in the early 16th Century, the sun is shown glinting off the ice cap that covers all the northern European countries. Since the 16th Century knew nothing of ice ages, you can’t help but wonder who was around, say twenty five thousand years ago with the technology and the desire to make maps whose accuracy would not be duplicated again until our own age. Along this line, who was around, a few years ago an English engineer wrote a book called, “The history of Metrology”, which is the study of measuring things. In his research through the old world, he discovered that some of these ancient peoples, the Greeks, the Romans, the Assyrians, for instance, used a measure of length that was a geo-physical reality, like our nautical mile. In other words, these ancient units of length were a segment of a mean circumference of the earth, or a segment of a "! ;greater circle” and not an arbitrary measure “from the king’s nose to the king’s finger”. Since all these people had to be unaware that their unit of length had a special geographical significance, the author of the book assumed that they had inherited their systems from some unknown culture in the distant past. Again, who? It’s a thought provoking book, “Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings”. Were there some technologically sophisticated people around at a time when other men were painting horses on cave walls?
Charles Hapgood’s Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings is a much needed scholarly examination of the large number of maps dating from the Renaissance period which seem to show an ice-free Antarctica and accurate depictions of areas thought to have been unknown at the time the maps were drawn. Since the maps in question were based on older maps which are now lost, the inevitable question is: How in the world could they have been created? Hapgood does not draw fantastic conclusions about ancient astronauts or magical powers, he simply sets forth compelling evidence that civilization is far older than orthodox science thinks. His work deserves to be taken seriously,not ignored.
At first reading Charles Hapgood makes a good argument for a crustal shift theory 10,000 years ago. Certainly, something must have happened at that time, to cause such a sudden end to the, so called, ice age. This book is well written and well thought out, if one does not accept geologist findings concerning the Antarctica, although it would not be the first time science was wrong.
The most interesting aspect, to me, about these, so called, ancient maps, is the idea that they were reported to be drawn up before Columbus sailed to the Western Hemisphere. This would seem to point toward a more advanced civilization in the past than we thought existed, and a civilization that had ventured out to the Western Hemisphere long before Columbus.
The fact that the oldest and largest stone megalith constructions are in South America (Peru), seems odd, considering mankind, it is believed, crossed into North America 10,000 years ago, and, according to archaeological thinking, waited till they reached Peru, around 1,000 AD, to move 300 plus ton stones around. Hapgood’s theory about ancient maps could be a possible explanation for how a civilization arrived in South America well before Columbus, perhaps 10,000 years ago. The megaliths of the Western World seem to be a thorn in the side of scientific theories, but by placing them in the civilizations which they were found, most megalith structures are explained away, which I find more convenient than scientific, but, with free thinkers, such as, Charles Hapgood, Graham Hancock, Robert Schoch, Eric Von Danyken (yes even Danyken) and many others on the sleuth, maybe an explanation is near. The search for past advanced civilizations is very exciting, and those engaged in that search should be commended not condemned. After all, anyone willing to believe the Egyptian people of 2500 BC built the Great Pyramids, albeit, on the slimmest of evidence, should be willing to accept a past advanced civilization theory, even if that idea is also on the slimmest of evidence, if it is, it is only because such evidence has greatly been ignored at the university and scientific levels.
Placing such theories, as Hapgood’s and Graham’s, and the many others, in our school’s textbooks, could make our educational institutions a more exciting and competitive atmosphere. It could launch the next generations on a great scientific quest. God forbid, they might even be induced to learn more.
I’d like to dispel an idea that’s pretty widespread — but without foundation. Some of the folks who’ve read Hapgood’s books seem to think he’s been disproved, for example, by plate tectonics or maybe ice cores. NOT SO.
Hapgood’s book about the ancient maps and his theory of crustal shift remain just as valid and plausible today as when he wrote them. His ideas have not been successfully debunked. It is true that he has been passed over — and often dismissed. But the reason is not because the maps and his theory of crustal shift have been disproved. They haven’t.
In my opinion science has passed over his work because the implications for our civilization are so horrific. It’s easy to see why this could be so. Even Hapgood himself didn’t want to face the logical conclusion of the wholesale mammoth and mastadon extinction in Siberia and Alaska at the end of the Pleistocene. Something killed those animals by the millions and quick froze them in vast muck beds — so that ten thousand years later the meat was still edible. This is fact — not conjecture. But the crunch is the flowers and other temperate zone vegetation found in their mouths. The animals were eating and were killed suddenly where they stood. Hapgood preferred to argue that the crustal shift occurred slowly — over a thousand years or more. But the evidence suggests that it was a very rapid event — a cataclysm.
The maps today remain, just as Hapgood claimed — necessary and sufficient evidence that a high civilization existed on earth long long before Sumer and ancient Egypt. The question is what happened to it?
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings is essential reading for anyone interested in the untold story of our human origins.
Charles H. Hapgood was a professor at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire who used the Piri Re’is map and others as a student project in the early 1960s to examine the origins of ancient maps. The Piri Re’is map was ostensibly a Turkish copy of a copy of a map that showed the new world before Columbus “discovered” it. It appears that Columbus believed that there was a new world to be found precisely because the map already showed it to be there!
What Hapgood discovered astonished both he and his students. Maps such as the Piri Re’is and Oronteus Finaeus maps showed, via a kind reverse engineering, evidence of being drawn using earlier maps that appear to have been composed using spherical geometry, which was not invented until much later than the Greek and Roman era. Hapgood notes that the maps also appear to have been drawn without what is known as the Eratosthenian Error, (a two percent error in the measurement of the earth) so they would appear to be definitively not originally composed by a map maker versed in the Greco-Roman tradition. He also discovered that the coastline of the Antarctic was accurately drawn (this confirmed by the chief of the cartographic section of Westover Air Force Base) at a time when it was not covered with ice. This would place the mapping at the very latest at about 4,000 BC and at the earliest, well beyond the purview of recorded history.
So what does all this mean? It means that there may have been an ancient seafaring people whose origins antedate recorded history, whose navigational skills were very close to those of our own era from a mathematical and geometric perspective. Who were they? Atlanteans, the Chinese, a civilization from the Indus River, Lemurians, Greenlanders, or unknown Antarctic wayfarers? No one knows but as Hapgood notes in his conclusion, “We find what we look for.”