The Big Book of Mysteries. Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe

and assuming again that these reappeared after an interval of well over a thousand years to form the basis of the portolanos, why did they vanish, and where might they have been hidden? The answer could lie in the grim and chronic struggle between Rome and Carthage known as the Punic Wars.

      To understand the hatred and rivalry between these two great ancient powers, it is necessary to look briefly at their respective histories.

      The first legend of the foundation of Rome relates how Aeneas, the Trojan prince, escaped from the ruin of Troy, married a Latin princess, and founded the city of Rome and the Julian Dynasty. The second legend concerns Romulus and Remus, descendants of Aeneas on their mother’s side, and, in the myth, the sons of Mars, god of war. Thrown into the Tiber by an unfriendly king of Latium, they drifted to Capitol Hill, were raised by a she-wolf, and founded Rome in 753 B.C. — a date from which all Roman history traditionally begins.

      The most likely historical origin is that clusters of settlements on Rome’s seven hills got together to form a city state round about 1000 B.C. Having been involved in various battles with fierce Celtic neighbours and Gauls, “Rome conquered the world in self-defence!”

      The Roman Empire was a great trading organization, and freedom of the seas was vitally important to her both commercially and militarily. The Carthaginians were the major maritime problem for Roman ships in the Mediterranean. It was inevitable that one power or the other would have to go down.

      The history of Carthage begins with Phoenician colonists from Lebanon and Syria 1,600 kilometres to the east. Lacking the manpower to establish large settlements, they set up a few coastal cities as trading posts. The silver and tin of southern Spain were a great attraction for them. Phoenicians looked for places easily accessible from the sea but not open to hostile tribes from the hinterland: they liked offshore islands, rocky peninsulas, and sandy bays to facilitate beaching their ships. Carthage conformed to this pattern. It was also in a good position to expand into the fertile areas around it. The name itself derives from two Phoenician words kart hadasht, which means “new city.”

      The implacable attitude separating the two great Mediterranean powers is clearly illustrated by the bitter words of the grim old Roman senator Marcus Porcius Cato (234–149 B.C.) “Delenda est Carthago” — “Carthage must be destroyed.”

      The first Punic War (264–261 B.C.) started because of problems in Sicily. The second (218–201 B.C.) ended with Scipio Africanus’s triumph over Hannibal, the Carthaginian general at the epoch-making Battle of Zama in what is now Tunisia. The third and final round (149–146 B.C.) ended with the total destruction of Carthage and her people.

      Did the precious old maps survive the destruction of Carthage, or were they safely onboard a Carthaginian ship that somehow evaded the Roman blockade and made its way east, back toward the old Phoenician homelands from which the ill-fated colony at Carthage had originally sprung?

      It is interesting to speculate that if the precious and highly accurate old map did find its way back to the Middle East before the final destruction of Carthage, it could well have surfaced again during the Crusades, the period prior to 1307 during which the indomitable Templars were in the ascendancy. They were great sailors as well as great soldiers: were their successes at sea due in part to their possession of superior maps and charts, copied from highly accurate originals that predated the maritime Phoenicians and Carthaginians?

      So one possible scenario suggests that some very ancient but unknown source produced maps of high quality, which in turn came into the hands of the Phoenicians, and passed from them — indirectly — to the Templars, and so to European navigators in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

      Where could the advanced technical knowledge behind those maps have come from in the first place? Assuming that Graham Hancock’s thoroughly researched and well-reasoned theories have the sound basis in fact that they certainly appear to have, then Antarctica would be as good a starting place as any.

      If Hapgood’s deductions about the ability of continental land masses to slide over the Earth’s surface — that is, if the crust is able to move independently of the core beneath it — are correct, then areas that once occupied warm or temperate zones may find themselves relatively quickly inside polar circles, and vice versa.

      Hapgood and his colleague, James Campbell, put forward the theory that the Earth’s crust rests on a very weak layer below — a layer that is virtually liquid. Following an idea suggested to them by Hugh Auchincloss Brown, an engineer, they investigated the possibility that a force powerful enough to move the entire crust of the Earth over this weak, quasi-liquid layer, could be generated by the mass of the polar ice-caps themselves, and their centrifugal effects arising from the Earth’s own rotation.

      The centre of gravity of the Antarctic ice-cap, for example, is approximately 483 kilometres from the South Pole: “As the Earth rotates,” suggests Hapgood, “the eccentricity creates a centrifugal effect that works horizontally on the crust, tending to displace it toward the equator.”

      Einstein himself supported this theory: in the introduction to Hapgood’s Earth’s Shifting Crust, Einstein wrote, “His (Hapgood’s) idea is original, of great simplicity, and — if it continues to prove itself — of great importance to everything that is related to the history of the Earth’s surface.”

      Following Hapgood’s hypothesis, if there was an advanced civilization living on Antarctica before it moved into a polar position where it would rapidly become ice-locked, what would such people do to save themselves, their children, and their culture?

      Such cataclysmic shifting of the Earth’s crust would inevitably be accompanied by dynamic geological and meteorological phenomena. There would be earthquakes, volcanic disturbances, fierce storms, destructive winds, and tidal waves. Those who could — those who had ships strong and buoyant enough to survive the devastation and the accelerating onset of the paralyzing cold — would head north toward warmer zones. Where might those fortunate few refugees and survivors have landed?

      Heading north from all sides of the ice-doomed Antarctic continent would bring the desperate travellers to either Cape Horn, the Cape of Good Hope, New Zealand’s South Island, the southern coast of Australia, or — if they travelled far enough due north along the 109 degrees west longitude — to the remote mysteries of Easter Island.

      Is there the faintest possibility that the indecipherable rongo-rongo script and the inexplicable stone heads of Easter Island are thousands of years older than is generally thought to be the case?

      Just suppose that a highly advanced civilization once flourished on the land that is now buried under hundreds of metres of Antarctic ice. Those of their refugees who travelled up the East African coast could eventually have reached Egypt. Was it their skill, perhaps, that designed and constructed the Sphinx and many of the other massive structures that are still defying time?

      Did another group of them reach South America and leave indelible traces of their architectural knowledge and structural expertise there as well?

      When the oldest indigenous Australians talk of the Dream Time does their mysticism go right back to another half-remembered place from which they came millennia ago, and will paintings one day be discovered under the ice of Antarctica that bear an uncanny resemblance to the oldest Australian rock and cave art?

      Puzzling legends of lost civilizations persist all over the world. The vanishing of a once great Antarctic civilization below the ice of the present South Pole might reveal the history behind those legends.

      We now move from the frozen wastes of Antarctica to the oppressive heat of the African sun for the next of the ancient mysteries — the Blombos Cave in South Africa. The caves contain a variety of wall carvings, many thousands of years old, that some experts believe could be the famous square and compasses symbol of the Masonic Order. There are daringly speculative historians and antiquarians who have suggested that the Order is far, far older than is generally recognized, and that modern Freemasonry is descended from a group