The Atlantis Blueprint by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online

increased the diameter of the earth by 4.5 degrees. If Hapgood allowed for that 4.5 degrees error, the Piri Reis map became even more accurate, suggesting that it had been based on ancient Greek (and Egyptian) source maps.
    When Piri Reis made his map, the famous mapmaker Gerardus Mercator was only one year old, so his work predated
    Mercator’s method of ‘projecting’ the earth on to a flat surface and marking it with latitude and longitude. Mapmakers used a simpler method, choosing some town as a centre, then drawing a circle round it that they divided into sixteen slices, like a cake. Then they drew squares inside the circle, and went on extending these outward, creating a kind of crude latitude and longitude – a complicated method, but one that worked well enough. When Hapgood’s students studied the Piri Reis map, they soon realised that its original ‘centre’ lay somewhere off the chart, to the east. Most of them guessed it would be Alexandria, but careful calculation revealed that the actual centre seemed to be Syene, the sacred centre of Upper Egypt, further support that they might have been dealing with an ancient map.
    When the mapmakers of Alexandria made their own maps, we may presume that they did not sail off to look at South America and Antarctica but based them on other older maps. But how old were they?
    An interesting piece of evidence offers us one clue. Towards the end of the second century BC, the Greek grammarian Agatharchides of Cnidus, a tutor to one of the Ptolemy kings of Egypt, was told that, according to ancient tradition, one side of the base of the Great Pyramid was precisely one-eighth of a minute of a degree of the earth’s polar circumference19 (a minute is one-sixtieth of a degree). Each side of the Great Pyramid’s base is 756 feet, or just over 230 metres, and if this is multiplied by 8, then by 60, then by 360, the result is just under 40,000 kilometres, or just under 25,000 miles (in fact, 24,933 miles) – again, an amazingly accurate assessment of the polar circumference of the earth. In fact the height of the Great Pyramid, in addition to its base, is also in exact proportion to the size of the earth – that is, its apex is where the North Pole should be.
    The Great Pyramid was built by the pharaoh Cheops (Khufu) around 2,500 BC, so how can the ancient Egyptians possibly have known the size of the earth? It is possible that they might have understood that it was a sphere, for example,by noting that the shadow of the earth on the moon during eclipses is curved, or by observing that a ship gradually vanishes below the horizon as it sails away.
    What impressed Hapgood so much was the astonishing accuracy of the Piri Reis map, once the 4.5-degree error had been allowed for. He noted that, in 1541, savants in Mexico City set out to decide its exact longitude by timing two eclipses of the moon, one in Mexico City and one in Toledo in Spain. Their calculations were off by miles. The ancient maps, on the other hand, were frequently accurate to within one half-degree of longitude – something Europeans didn’t achieve until John Harrison invented the marine chronometer in the eighteenth century.
    Hapgood was also intrigued by a large island shown off the coast of South America. Located at 5 degrees north on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, it seems to be about 300 miles in diameter, yet it is certainly not there today. Moreover, the island is also shown on the Reinel Chart of 1510, and on a map of 1737 by the French cartographer Philip Buache.
    Hapgood was naturally interested in other portolans, and in 1959 he wrote to ask the Library of Congress if they had any more. He was invited to come and see for himself – when he arrived there at Thanksgiving, he was slightly embarrassed to find hundreds of them laid out for his inspection. He spent several days looking through the maps, and then, as he describes it, ‘I turned a page and sat transfixed.’ What he was looking at was a map made