Ancient Aliens — The Piri Reis Map
Ancient Aliens — The Piri Reis Map
Overview
The Piri Reis Map is an Ottoman world map drawn on gazelle skin in 1513 CE by Ottoman admiral and cartographer Piri Reis. It is one of the oldest surviving maps to show the Americas, incorporating information from Christopher Columbus's voyages and other contemporary sources. It became central to the ancient aliens and lost civilization literature when Charles Hapgood argued in his 1966 book Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings that the map showed the Antarctic coastline — under its current ice sheet — with accuracy impossible without aerial surveying from above.
The Map
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Creator | Piri Reis (Haci Ahmet Muhiddin Piri); Ottoman admiral and cartographer |
| Date | 1513 CE |
| Material | Gazelle skin parchment |
| Current location | Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul |
| Primary content | Western coast of Africa; eastern coast of South America; fragmentary landmass at the bottom |
| Piri Reis's own notes | Compiled from approximately 20 source maps including charts from Columbus and Ptolemy; notes the sources explicitly |
| The disputed element | A landmass at the bottom of the map, south of South America |
The Ancient Alien Claim
Charles Hapgood, and subsequently von Daniken, argued:
- The landmass at the bottom of the Piri Reis map accurately depicts the coastline of Antarctica — including the sub-glacial coastline under the ice sheet
- Antarctica was not known to Europeans until 1820 — 307 years after the map was drawn
- Sub-glacial Antarctic coastline data was not available until modern seismic surveys in the 1950s
- Piri Reis's notes say he compiled the map from ancient source charts — implying those source charts were themselves drawn from an unknown earlier civilization or aerial surveying capability
- Aerial surveys would be required to produce accurate coastal cartography of an ice-covered continent
Problems with the Antarctic Claim
The Landmass is Not Antarctica
The most fundamental problem: cartographic historians have demonstrated that the landmass at the bottom of the Piri Reis map is not Antarctica. It is a distorted representation of South America's southern portion and possibly Patagonia — a common feature of early 16th-century maps that often depicted a speculative southern continent (Terra Australis) at the bottom of the world. The misidentification of this landmass as Antarctica requires ignoring the explicit geographic context of the rest of the map.
Sub-Glacial Coastline Accuracy
The specific Antarctic coastline accuracy claim — that the map shows the ice-free coastline as revealed by 1950s surveys — was tested by cartographers who found that the claimed matches required selective reading of the map, ignoring many features that did not match, and applying considerable interpretive latitude in what constitutes a "match."
Hapgood's Analysis
Charles Hapgood was a college professor of history of science with no specific cartographic expertise. His Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings was not peer-reviewed by cartographic historians. When professional cartographers examined his claims, they found the accuracy correspondences he described were not statistically significant.
The Source Charts
Piri Reis's own notes explicitly state his sources: contemporary European and Islamic charts, Columbus's charts of the Caribbean, Ptolemaic geography charts, and charts from Portuguese explorations. No mysterious ancient source charts are required to explain the map's content.
What the Piri Reis Map Actually Shows
The Piri Reis map is genuinely historically significant — it is one of the earliest maps incorporating the New World discoveries. Its distortions and inaccuracies are consistent with the composite nature of early 16th-century cartography, which stitched together maps of different projections and scales without a unified mathematical framework. This produces exactly the kind of regional accuracy combined with large-scale distortion that the map shows.
