Piri Reis map, an ancient mistery

In 1929, cleaning workers in Topkapi Palace, the harem of the last Turkish sultan, accidentally discovered a broken, dust-covered map.

At first glance, it represents the coasts of Africa, Spain and South America. On closer examination, the researchers concluded that navigators from an unknown civilization had discovered Antarctica thousands of years earlier and mapped the continent.

The map was made in 1513 on gazelle skin, by a Turkish admiral, a former pirate named Piri Reis. The traces of the map were lost for 400 years, its discovery making a sensation at that time. Historians and cartographers alike first became interested in the inscription that showed that it had been drawn from the sketches of Christopher Columbus.

It was said that a Genoese unbeliever named Christopher Columbus discovered those lands. The researchers assumed that the map was related to the famous lost map of Columbus, which represented the Antilles.

The US and Turkish governments have tried in vain to find the document. The search soon ceased, although many mysteries surrounding the map had not been solved. It is not known how the longitudes of Africa and South America were determined with such a small margin of error 200 years before the invention of the stopwatch.

In 1956, Arlington Mallery, a specialist in ancient maps and known for claiming that the Vikings had discovered America before Columbus, examined a copy of the map.

He said what at first appeared to be the extremity of South America actually represented the bays and islands off the coast of Antarctica. It is a generally accepted fact that the discovery of the South Pole dates back to 1820. Or, if Mallery was right, someone knew of the continent's existence as early as the sixteenth century, if not earlier.

Some clues tend to place the sources on which Piri Reis relied in a very distant time. Geologists believe that Antarctica has disappeared under the ice for two million years. The map seems to indicate the altitude of some mountains that have long disappeared under the ice.

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