The Big Book of Mysteries. Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe

Josef Szombathy was working at a paleolithic site there in 1908, he discovered the remarkable little statuette carved out of oolitic limestone and tinted with red ochre. Among the many suggestions about her meaning and origin is that what looks like her hair is actually a space helmet — implying that she is really an extraterrestrial!

      The idea of highly technical visitors from space (if that’s what she was) is supported by the fact that there are numerous ancient buildings and subterranean labyrinths that the best modern machinery would be hard-pressed to construct: and there are very old maps, copies of even older maps, which show the detail of coastlines and geographical features that have been totally inaccessible for millennia because of a thick covering of ice.

      In July 1960, United States Air Force lieutenant Colonel Harold Z. Ohlmeyer of the 8th Reconnaissance Technical Squadron, Westover, Massachusetts, wrote a devastatingly important letter to Professor Charles H. Hapgood. Hapgood had asked Ohlmeyer to study the Piri Reis map drawn by that famous old Turkish admiral in 1513, and Ohlmeyer’s answer was that the seismic work of the 1949 Anglo-Swedish Expedition showed that Reis’s coastline, far below the present Antarctic ice sheet, was accurate. Ohlmeyer concluded that the coastline in question had been mapped before the ice covered it.

      Stonehenge.

      Who was Piri Reis, and how did he get that accurate geographical information in the early sixteenth century? He was a high-ranking officer in the Ottoman Turkish Empire, and, as far as can be judged, a particularly honest and open character. He did not claim to have compiled his map by his own unaided efforts or his own practical cartographic expeditions, although he was an excellent sailor who travelled far and wide, and had written a textbook about sailing. Notes in his own handwriting explain how he compiled his map from many sources — some of them as recent as Christopher Columbus, others going back to at least 400 B.C. Somehow or another he clashed with the Ottoman High Command and was beheaded around 1555. His precious map drawn on gazelle skin was rediscovered in the old Imperial Palace in Constantinople in 1929.

      The Venus of Willendorf in Austria. Is she wearing a space helmet?

      Hapgood’s work in 1963 envisaged Reis working away among the ancient documents preserved at Constantinople, which were themselves based on far older sources, compiled in turn from older sources still … and going back beyond 4000 B.C. This argument implied that a very advanced technological civilization had existed at a far more distant date than was generally accepted by most prehistorians. Hapgood traced this channel of geographical and navigational information through the Minoan and Phoenician cultures, through ancient Egypt, and back beyond that. How far was ancient Atlantis connected with these mysterious, old maps?

      One map alone, however interesting its history, and however accurate its details of the Antarctic coastline, could be regarded as nothing more than a strange coincidence. If another old map turned up independently, that would be much more significant. Well, such a map did in fact appear: it is known as the Oronteus Finaeus map and was drawn in 1531–32. It depicts mountain ranges as well as a surprisingly accurate Antarctic coastline, and realistic rivers draining down from the mountains. It is also significant that the central area nearest to the South Pole itself has been left blank — as though the accurate and honest cartographer who drew it has acknowledged that this central region is heavily shrouded in ice so that no details of mountains or rivers can be surveyed or measured.

      THREADS OF TIME

      There is one anachronistic mystery that concerned a length of gold thread that was found inside a lump of coal estimated at three hundred million years old. Had a time traveller lost it when that piece of coal was growing as a green and fertile tree?

      A major discrepancy on the Oronteus Finaeus map is that the Antarctic Peninsula goes too far north, almost touching Cape Horn. But a closer scrutiny of the whole of Oronteus’s representation of the Antarctic continent shows that all of it extends too far from the centre, too far north, in fact, in every direction. It is not inaccurate — it’s simply drawn to the wrong scale for the rest of the Finaeus map. Whoever first made the scaling error, it was made in the distant past and copied by a succession of cartographers, including Piri Reis.

      The very old portolanos on which the medieval navigators depended did not carry regular grid lines like our modern lines of latitude and longitude. Instead they tended to use central points — located at various positions on the map — from which lines radiated like the closely fitting spokes of a bicycle wheel. The centres may have been meant to reproduce the directions of a primitive mariner’s compass, and navigation would probably have proceeded by attempting to recognize the ship’s location by the position of various landmarks, islands, cliffs, bays, and headlands. Having established his present position, the navigator would possibly have tried to line up the ship’s course along the grid line which would have taken it nearest to his intended destination.

      A.E. Nordenskiöld, who was an acknowledged world authority in this area, compiled an atlas from the many portolanos he studied, and concluded that they were based on much older and far more accurate maps. He argued that the Dulcert Portolano of 1339 was particularly accurate beyond the capabilities of typical fourteenth century navigators and cartographers. He thought that there was no observable development in the maps and charts that appeared from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Two hundred years of sailing, exploration, and discovery was not reflected in the maps. He concluded that this was because someone in the early 1300s had discovered an exceptionally accurate map, one that was destined not to be surpassed for the next two centuries at least. It also seemed to Nordenskiöld that there was only one such excellent original and that all the good and reliable portolanos had been copied from it.

      His measurements revealed that as far as the Mediterranean and the Black Sea were concerned, all the portolanos were practically identical, and the same scale was used on all.

      Nordenskiöld was intrigued to find that the scale used was not obviously linked with the customary Mediterranean units of measurement, except for those found in Catalonia. He suggested that the historical link between Catalan and the ancient Phoenicians and Carthaginians could well account for this. If the units of measurement and the scale were Carthaginian, then there was a strong possibility that the original, accurate map from which the good portolanos had been copied, had also been known to the Carthaginians — even if it had not originated with them.

      Nordenskiöld then examined the role of Marinus of Tyre, a navigator who lived during the second century A.D. and was the predecessor of the famous Ptolemy.

      Theodorus Meliteniota of Byzantium, from whom most of the information about the great scholar’s life is derived, suggests that Claudius Ptolemaus, popularly known as Ptolemy, was born in the Greek city of Ptolemais Hermii, and did most of his scientific, astronomical, and mathematical work in Alexandria. He was certainly making astronomical observations between the years A.D. 127 and 151, and may still have been working as late as 155. There is also an Arabian tradition that Ptolemy died at the age of seventy-eight.

      From his studies of the portolanos, Nordenskiöld felt that the units of measurement used could not have been from a time later than that of Marinus of Tyre, and were probably far earlier. Comparing them with Ptolemy’s work, he saw clearly that the original source from which the portolanos had been copied was greatly superior.

      To give Ptolemy the credit he richly deserves, he was the most famous geographer of his time. He had access to the greatest library of the ancient world, and all its geographical documents and records. He was a fine mathematician and posessed a modern, scientific attitude to the phenomena he observed and studied. As Hapgood so rightly argues in Maps of the Ancient Sea-Kings, it is very unlikely that medieval sailors during the fourteenth century without the advantages of Ptolemy’s reference library and high mathematical skills could have produced charts superior to his.

      Assuming that it was the Carthaginians and Phoenicians