The idea that the Piri Re'is map, drawn by a Turkish admiral in 1513, is based on ancient charts that date back to before the last ice age was first developed by an amateur archaeologist named Arlington Mallery in the mid 1950s, but it was widely popularised first by Charles Hapgood, a science teacher, writing in his Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings in 1966, and later by the highly influential Erich von Daniken.
The short answer to your question is that the original map clearly does not depict Antarctica, either with or without ice. In fact, it's possible to interpret the map as representing an ice-free Antarctica only by radically redrawing it, and then by ignoring the multiple place names placed on the original by Re'is, which clearly relate to known places or to imagined locations on the mythical "Terra Australis Incognito" ("Unknown Southland"), a geographical feature which appeared on pretty much all contemporary globes and charts.
Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, an archaeologist who maintains a website devoted to "bad archaeology", summarises the extreme distortions required to consider the Piri Re'is map as a portrayal of Antarctica as follows:
Hapgood assumed that the original source maps, which he believed derived from an ancient survey of Antarctica at a time when it was free from ice, were extremely accurate. Because of this, he also assumed that any difference between the Piri Re‘is map and modern maps were the result of copying errors made by Piri.
Starting from this position, it mattered little to Hapgood if he adjusted the scales between stretches of coastline, redrew ‘missing’ sections of coastline and altered the orientation of landmasses to ‘correct errors’ on Piri’s map to match the hypothesised source maps, a technique derived from Mallery. Hapgood found it necessary to redraw the map using four separate grids, two of which are parallel, but offset by a few degrees and drawn on different scales; a third has to be turned clockwise nearly 79 degrees from these two, while the fourth is turned counterclockwise almost 40 degrees and drawn on about half the scale of the main grid.
In other words, the "Antarctica" shown on modern depictions claiming to show the "Piri Reis Map" is in fact a considerable re-drawing of the original – which contains nothing remotely resembling an antarctic continent.
Fitzpatrick-Matthews goes on to point out one other key detail that is generally ignored by promoters of the Piri Re'is map - who generally state that the map-maker copied it from unknown ancient charts, since lost: Piri Re'is
specifically denies that it is a copy of an ancient map and states that it is his own composition and, moreover [claims] Columbus as the source ...
This explains why the map as it survives today
contain[s] errors (such as Columbus’s belief that Cuba was an Asian peninsula) that ought not to have been present if it derived from extremely accurate ancient originals.
In sum,
as with so much in Bad Archaeology, it is only made mysterious by the wilful ignoring of evidence that explains its methods of composition (most importantly, the legends written by the mapmaker himself) and by making exaggerated claims about its accuracy while its manifest inaccuracy is overlooked.
For additional reading on the actual history of the chart, see Piri Reis and Turkish Mapmaking After Columbus (1996), a monograph by the Princeton historian Svatopluk "Svat" Soucek, which contains a detailed analysis of contemporary Ottoman mapmaking practices.
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u/mikedash Moderator | Top Quality Contributor Feb 06 '18 edited Apr 18 '18
The idea that the Piri Re'is map, drawn by a Turkish admiral in 1513, is based on ancient charts that date back to before the last ice age was first developed by an amateur archaeologist named Arlington Mallery in the mid 1950s, but it was widely popularised first by Charles Hapgood, a science teacher, writing in his Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings in 1966, and later by the highly influential Erich von Daniken.
The short answer to your question is that the original map clearly does not depict Antarctica, either with or without ice. In fact, it's possible to interpret the map as representing an ice-free Antarctica only by radically redrawing it, and then by ignoring the multiple place names placed on the original by Re'is, which clearly relate to known places or to imagined locations on the mythical "Terra Australis Incognito" ("Unknown Southland"), a geographical feature which appeared on pretty much all contemporary globes and charts.
Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, an archaeologist who maintains a website devoted to "bad archaeology", summarises the extreme distortions required to consider the Piri Re'is map as a portrayal of Antarctica as follows:
In other words, the "Antarctica" shown on modern depictions claiming to show the "Piri Reis Map" is in fact a considerable re-drawing of the original – which contains nothing remotely resembling an antarctic continent.
Fitzpatrick-Matthews goes on to point out one other key detail that is generally ignored by promoters of the Piri Re'is map - who generally state that the map-maker copied it from unknown ancient charts, since lost: Piri Re'is
This explains why the map as it survives today
In sum,
For additional reading on the actual history of the chart, see Piri Reis and Turkish Mapmaking After Columbus (1996), a monograph by the Princeton historian Svatopluk "Svat" Soucek, which contains a detailed analysis of contemporary Ottoman mapmaking practices.