Secret_History

226 The Secret History of the World
Topkapi Palace in Istanbul in 1929, and a Turkish naval officer had presented a
copy of it to the US Navy Hydrographic Office. It was examined by scholars who
noted that the map represented Antarctica before it was covered with ice. Yet, the
map was painted on parchment and was dated to 1513, over 300 years before
Antarctica was officially “discovered”. Core samples taken by the Byrd Antarctic
Expedition showed that the last warm period in the Antarctic ended around 4,000
BC. It began about 9,000 years before that. The only conclusion that could be
drawn was that someone had mapped Antarctica at least 6,000 years ago. Hapgood
discovered that there were more of these ancient maps - portolans, as they are
called - and that some of them strongly indicate that the mapmaker had an aerial
view of what he was mapping! Hapgood himself writes:
The evidence presented by the ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in
remote times, before the rise of any known cultures, of a true civilisation, of an
advanced kind, which either was localized in one area but had worldwide
commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in
some respects, was more advanced than the civilizations of Greece and Rome. In
geodesy, nautical science, and mapmaking it was more advanced than any known
culture before the 18 th century of the Christian Era. It was only in the 18 th century
that we developed a practical means of finding longitude. It was in the 18 th century
that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Not until the 19 th
century did we begin to send out ships for exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic
Seas and only then did we begin the exploration of the bottom of the Atlantic. The
maps indicate that some ancient people did all these things.[…]
When I was a youth I had a plain simple faith in progress. It seemed to me
impossible that once man had passed a milestone of progress in one way that he
could ever pass the same milestone again the other way. Once the telephone was
invented, it would stay invented. If past civilizations had faded away it was just
because they had not learned the secret of progress. But Science meant permanent
progress, with no going back.[…] S.R.K. Glanville writes in The Legacy of Egypt:
“It may be, as some indeed suspect, that the science we see as the dawn of recorded
history was not science at its dawn, but represents the remnants of the science of
some great and as yet untraced civilization.” 140
By a series of analyses, Hapgood and others came to the conclusion that there
was an ancient civilization whose center or “home base” was Antarctica itself. 141
The fact that it was a global society, just as our own is, was also evident to these
researchers from other clues. This was, to put it mildly, not an acceptable idea to
the uniformitarian view of evolution.
140 Ibid.
141 Flem-Ath, Rand and Rose, When the Sky Fell (Canada: St. Martins 1995).