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The 500-Year Old Map That Shows Antarctica Without Snow And Ice. Maps usually clarify things, but in the case of a 500+-year-old gazelle-skin parchment called the Piri Reis Map, its discovery only created more mystery.
For one thing, the map appears to show Antarctica almost 300 years before it was discovered. Not only does it show Antarctica, but the continent is drawn as a land mass as it would have appeared before it was covered with its ice cap over 6,000 years ago.
The Piri Reis map was created in 1513, 260 years before James Cook discovered Antarctica. So why was it on this world map?
On October 9, 1929, a German theologian named Gustav Adolf Deissmann was cataloguing items in the Topkapi Palace library in Istanbul when he happened across a curious parchment located among some disregarded material. On the gazelle skin parchment was a map, now referred to as the Piri Reis map.
The Piri Reis map is a world map compiled in 1513 by the Ottoman admiral and cartographer Piri Reis. Approximately one third of the map survives, housed in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. When rediscovered in 1929, the remaining fragment garnered international attention as it includes a partial copy of an otherwise lost map by Christopher Columbus.
Mystery, legends, and misinterpretation surround the Buache Map, a French cartographer’s depiction of Antarctica without ice. The Buache Map is an 18th century map commonly claimed to accurately depict the continent of Antarctica before it was buried by ice.
Old maps of Antarctica. Antarctic Ocean (1901) 1901. London : Admiralty. The Earth: a descriptive history of the phenomena of the life of the Globe ... (The Ocean, Atmosphere and Life; being the second series of A descriptive history of the phenomena of the life of the Globe, etc.) Translated by ... B. B. Woodward and edited by H. Woodward ...
Theories have been posited about an earlier discovery of Antarctica and even the possibility of pyramids existing on the frozen continent. The story of the Piri Reis map is one that mixes reality and fantasy; it is an ancient document that has fueled modern mysteries.
Originally completed in 1590, Plancius’s world map depicts Antarctica as nearly reaching the southern end of South America, like Theatrum.
In this 200th anniversary year of the first known sighting of the continent, this first of two articles gives a whistle-stop tour through maps held in the British Library that chart Antarctica’s gradual emergence from obscurity into light.