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.

New informations about the Dead Sea Scrolls

The famous Dead Sea Scrolls continue to generate riddles, decades after their discovery. A recent study concluded that at least one different technique was used to obtain one of them than the rest, an unknown technique, unheard of to this day. The parchment that attracted the attention of researchers, one of the most important in the collection, is one with an age of almost 2.000 years, which has been remarkably well preserved, despite the conditions in which it was kept and despite its size. of the largest. Found by the Bedouins in 1956, north of the Dead Sea, it was sold to an antique dealer. He did not keep it in the best conditions, but still wrapped it in cellophane and stored it in a shoe box, hidden under the floor, according to Science Alert. The "Temple Parchment", as he is known, has survived, but is currently the thinnest of the parchments (a collection of about 900 pieces). It is only one tenth of a millimeter thick. However, it was preserved, and the material ...

Hundreds of metal spheres under pyramid in Mexico

Archaeologists have discovered hundreds of metal spheres buried under an ancient pyramid near Mexico City. Scientists have no idea what the mysterious balls were for. Jorge Zavala, an archaeologist at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico, described the discovery as "unprecedented." The spheres have been hidden for the last 1800 years in one of the most important pre-Hispanic temples in Mexico City, writes gizmodo.com. The city of Teotihuacan, just 45 kilometers from Mexico City, was once one of the largest cities in the world, with more than 100,000 inhabitants, at a time when only 200 million people lived on Earth. Its massive population makes it even more mysterious the total abandonment of the city in the year 700 of our era. The people of Teotihuacan knew very well that they would never return to the city, so before fleeing from it, they filled their much-loved temples with waste and garbage. Their level was so high that it took scientists only a f...

The lost city of the Kalahari desert in South Africa

The great Canadian explorer Guillermo Farini described in a paper a mysterious city, discovered in the Kalahari Desert in 1885. The report was sent to the Royal Geographical Society in the United Kingdom, along with a collection of sketches and photographs, and Farini also published a book describing the findings in detail. Farini, one of the first Westerners to cross the Kalahari Desert, claimed that the city had been built in the shape of a circular arch, and some sections were buried in the sand at the time of the discovery of the ruins. Professor A. J. Clemente, who researched the images and history of the place, assumed that the city described in Farini's report was a simple agglomeration of natural rocks, which only resembled the walls of a human settlement. Since the report was published, at least 25 expeditions have been organized to the Kalahari, in the area indicated by Farini, but scientists have failed to locate the walls described by the Canadian explorer.

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