Istanbul

The Piri Reis Map and the Antarctic Coast

In 1929 a surviving fragment of a map drawn by the Ottoman admiral Piri Reis in 1513 was found in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. Charles Hapgood, and Erich von Däniken after him, announced that the southern part of the map showed the coast of Antarctica beneath its ice, surveyed from the air by an unknown civilisation. Piri Reis wrote his sources on the margin himself: some twenty portolans, Arab charts and a map of Columbus. The southern line on his sheet is the east coast of South America, bent eastward because the parchment ran out — a device found on other portolans of the period. It bears no resemblance to the true sub-glacial topography of Antarctica established by seismic survey.