On Aug 2, 9:48?am, "Reginald P. Smithers III"
wrote:
Chuck Gould wrote:
On Aug 1, 4:01?am, Short Wave Sportfishing wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 10:13:23 -0700, Chuck Gould

wrote:
What a hot topic for rec.boats, 2007.
A 15th Century Turkish navigator produced a map that accurately
depicted
not only the not-yet officially "discovered" Atlantic coastlines of
North and South America, but also the Antarctic continent in an ice-
free state that last existed about 6000 years ago. Piri Reis claimed
that some of the source material for his map came from the libraries
of Alexander the Great, dating those documents to a time about 1800
years before Columbus sailed to the West Indies.
http://www.world-mysteries.com/sar_1.htm
Oh good lord, not this again.

I think I'll just let this thread die - as quickly as possible.

Besides, the Vikings discovered everything anyway long before any
other groups - including Idaho.

You scoff at Piri Reis?

Has this somehow been shown to be fraudulent, or do you disbelieve
because it seems more comfortable to do so?

You're a student of history, Tom. You might enjoy a book I'm now
reading, "1491". Just in the last 30-40 years there have been some
amazing discoveries in anthropology and archeology that debunk a lot
of what we learned as kids in school. Some of these discoveries have
occurred as Amazon rain forests have been burned away, revealing
enormous areas of cultivated land, building sites in Peru (for
example) capable of housing populations many times larger than ever
officially thought to have existed there.

Knowledge isn't stagnant. The state of the art "knowledge" from just a
generation ago is almost obsolete today. Doesn't mean that every new
thing that comes along is true, of course, but we should consider the
possibility and examine things carefully because some of the new
things will indeed prove to be valid.

Chuck,
I had never heard about the map before, but i did find a web site from
the University of Wis. that seemed to provide a realistic review of the map.

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/PiriRies.HTM- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -


And even this ardent critic has this to say about the map:

"For 1513, this map shows an astonishing amount of detail. The notes
on the map explain that the map was synthesized from about 20 maps,
many of which were captured from Spanish and Portuguese ships in the
Mediterranean. It was also supplemented by accounts given by captured
Spanish and Portuguese sailors.

Not a map from some ancient Atlantean civilization, not a map created
by extraterrestrials, but a first class piece of naval intelligence.
Considering that it was created by a sailor whose country never
participated in the age of exploration, and that it's drawn wholly
from second-hand sources, it's an astonishing piece of work. It seems
to contain up-to-the-minute details derived from enemy maps, many of
which would have been tightly-guarded secrets.

There's a class of crank that hates the idea that other people might
have real accomplishments, because they never accomplish anything
themselves. So Shakespeare didn't write his plays, other people did;
Robert Peary didn't reach the North Pole as he claimed, and so on. And
Piri Reis wasn't a gifted admiral and good intelligence analyst, but
had to get help from ancient lost documents. Get a life, folks."

If you get past Van Daniken's claims, (and those of others) that the
Piri Reis map was some sort of gift to mankind from little green men
from outerspace, it's still a remarkable document.

One of the cheap shots associated with your critical site is that it
examines this document from the early 1500's through the lens of
current cartography capabilities. Compare Piri Reis to nearly any
other map or chart from that era, particularly for an area a vast as
Piri Reis incorporates, and I think most people would agree that Piri
Reis is in a class of its own.

Even the detractors don't claim it's any sort of forgery or hoax- no
serious "Shroud of Turin" controversy surrounds the Piri Reis map.

Our grandkids grandkids will learn, factually, that people were
crossing both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans to North America for a
very long time before Columbus.