In the news of “The only surviving copy of the 500-year-old map that first used the name America” going on display at the Library of Congress it appears that Reuters is rather amazed by the map. Others also seem amazed that there is such accurate detail of regions not yet explored by Europeans in 1507 on the map. How a German monk named Martin Waldseemuller made these maps is simply a mystery according to the mainstream media.
I suppose that is better than calling the map a forgery as is often done with anything that violates the history we are taught in school. Usually it is far easier to declare something that doesn’t match to be untrue rather than to do the investigation and find out what is really lacking is one’s knowledge of the subject. It is not much different than what we see in the election campaign with regards to Ron Paul on subjects the other candidates haven’t done their homework on. Ron Paul is cast as a "kook" or what he talks about as "imaginary" simply because the critics don’t know or understand it.
What we are taught in school is what is considered "safe" or "acceptable" for the masses. It is not information that will encourage critical thinking, but lessons that will reinforce that the world is what one is told it is. If they say that Europeans thought the world to be flat until Columbus sailed off to the islands around Cuba, that’s the way it was. That’s the acceptable history; a history that we are to believe is a slow progression from following game animals and picking berries to the technology we have today.
Advances in technology and knowledge are not that simple in the real world. It is all rather fragile. It takes effort to preserve it and advance it. If there are no rewards for that effort, advancement stops and what exists begins to decay. Not only that, there are always people who actively try to restrict knowledge to the few. Knowledge that is limited in who knows it is the most easily lost. Knowledge has to be spread far and wide to have the best chance at survival.
Mapping of the world has always been very important to civilization. From the following of game animals to knowing where your aircraft and tanks are on the battlefield, knowing where you are and where you are going has been extremely important. Knowing it better than the other guy even more so. Because of this, maps are special, and until recent centuries very expensive and very restricted. Even today there are maps that are restricted for national security by various governments.
When we look at what has been left by the ancient world, many just see an amazing structure or an interesting story/myth. What we really see is knowledge. Sometimes it is in a form that is dismissed today as myth. Sometimes it is written in stone. In the form of myth, knowledge is more easily remembered. Instead of memorizing numbers and facts they are encoded into a story that is easily remembered and passed down from one generation to the next. The durability of a stone structure is another way to achieve the same goal, where it’s alignments to the planet, the solar system, and the universe combined with its own dimensions become a storehouse of knowledge that could last for thousands of years. It is man's desire that his work, his contributions live on beyond his time that drive such things, to create something to say that he was here.
As more is discovered about the past, a different picture of the ancient world arises. This picture not only changes for the ancient world we have been taught about (from 6,000 years ago to the present) but one far older. It defies the view of the world handed to us that man had civilization prior to the establishment of the earliest known cities that sprang up out of nowhere. From the weathering of the Sphinx indicating it is much older than conventionally accepted to knowledge making its way from one corner of the world to another long ago things were likely quite different than what we were taught they were. We weren't taught an accurate history, but rather the history we were supposed to know, shaped over time by those in power from era to era.
Both stone monuments and myths show that ancient man knew astronomy to a level not equaled in many ways until the 20th century. From Mexico to Egypt to Scandinavia and beyond it is clear that man charted the movements of the moon, the sun, and the stars and knew the precession and size of the earth.
Should it be any different with mapping of the Earth itself? I would think that it would not be. Any civilization capable of calculating the diameter of the planet, the movement of the earth in the universe over time scales of tens of thousands of years should have also had the capability of mapping the globe provided they had the desire to explore.
In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age, Charles H. Hapgood goes into detail on several ancient maps showing how much knowledge went into creating them. This knowledge did not exist in the 16th century or at least should not have.
Hapgood shows how various maps from the age of exploration were apparently pasted together from a variety of sources including the newest explorations of the day. Often the "new" information from explorers was of much lower quality than that from unknown sources. The maps are a mixture of types of projection (some not known to the map-makers) and scale. Much as if someone without knowledge was simply trying to make something out of bits and pieces of information in front of him, not knowing from where much of it came or the details of its presentation. The maps indicate the decay of more advanced knowledge.
Graham Hancock does a little follow-up of Hapgood’s work in his book Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization by generating what the coast lines should have looked like at the end of the ice age using satellite measurements and other data. The book details the search for the cities of an ice age civilization, which like today’s cities would be near coastlines. Coastlines long ago submerged. The matching of ice age coastlines and old maps is remarkable.
The idea that there was prior knowledge is rather logical. Piri Reis is recorded as having said he compiled his maps using ancient sources as well as knowledge of explorers. His famous 16th-century map also shows great detail and knowledge that he should not have had by conventional "wisdom." (Even the US military found Piri Reis’s map of the coastline of Antarctica without ice to be a probable and reasonable interpretation of the map. The letter from 1960 is quoted here.) Even Columbus has been recorded as saying that he had ancient maps to guide him. Educated Europeans knew the world wasn’t flat, as did the sailors with practical knowledge. If anyone thought it was flat, it would be the masses that were intentionally denied knowledge.
The masses were simply kept in the dark regarding the nature of the world. The information had survived from the earlier time, just in incomplete pieces and kept secret among the few. We now know just some of the technology and knowledge of the Roman Empire that was lost in the dark ages. From Galen with medicine in Rome to Heron’s use of steam power in ancient Greece, mechanical computers (Antikythera mechanism), bearings, siege machines, and more were lost for centuries. So what of even older knowledge?
Man’s knowledge hasn’t been the consistent advance with minor setbacks, but one of advancement, setbacks, and outright crashes. We are supposed to believe those crashes do not occur. (Where have we heard that before? Real estate? Stock market?) It’s not just a dark age where a few hundred years of advancement are lost, but rather a crash where man is taken down to a level where he essentially begins again. As castrophism gains ground scientifically there is reason to believe such a crash could have occurred.
Natural disaster and man himself are the largest dangers to knowledge. We see war and tyranny even today destroying the knowledge of the past. Be it the destruction of artifacts in the museums in Iraq to fundamentalists of all religions and beliefs destroying the monuments, libraries, of those that they conquer. The Spanish burned the libraries of the Maya, a disaster not unlike that of the loss of the library of Alexandria. Today we are supposed to worry about the sea rising a few inches; at the end of the ice age it rose hundreds of feet. Even if the bad events were just a few feet at a time, what would that do to a civilization?
The amazement at how a German monk knew what South America looked like before any European supposedly had been there isn’t well placed when such aspects were common of maps made at the time. We know that this knowledge came from maps that were very old when mapmakers compiled the information in the 15th to 17th centuries. There really isn’t any mystery to the creation of the maps themselves. The mystery is what is our real past? If we could ask these mapmakers of five centuries ago, they could not answer us. They were just the last in a long line of people who copied and preserved very ancient knowledge. Whatever our real history is, I know it isn’t the neat and tidy story we were taught in school.
December 7, 2007
