The impossible maps
In the libraries of Alexandria initially, and later in Constantinople, the accumulated knowledge of the oldest civilizations on Earth was preserved for centuries. Unfortunately, much of that knowledge has been dispersed or lost due to plunder, fires, and devastations, leaving modern science in dire straits when attempting to reconstruct humanity's remote past reliably.
It is precisely from these ancient and vast libraries (where millions of books and papyri are said to have been kept) that three geographic maps have recently sparked enormous perplexity among scientists, as they relate history and archaeology as known today.
According to "official" history, the first human civilization to develop on Earth was that of the Sumerians, dating back to around 4000 BC, followed by the Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations. However, it has now been discovered that these three ancient maps, seemingly copied or traced from maps held in the archives of the libraries of Alexandria and Constantinople, indicate a possibly much older origin, as they could have been drawn as early as 10,000 BC, depicting coastlines and continents in the form they were only at that time.
This would suggest that as early as 10,000 years BC, there were advanced peoples on Earth capable of navigating and mapping geographic areas...
The most famous of these three "impossible" maps is the one that Turkish admiral Piri Re'is traced from an ancient parchment in 1513: in this map, regions of Antarctica at the South Pole are represented with remarkable accuracy, centuries before their actual discovery. Moreover, certain features of the Americas and the Amazon River on this map provide information that explorers would only discover many years later.
But the most surprising feature of the Piri Re'is map is the fact that it was drawn using an extremely sophisticated technique, the "equidistant projection," which traces the profile of the Earth from a single specific point on its surface: precisely, the center of Piri Re'is's map is very close to the ancient Egyptian city of Syene, on the Nile. The most inexplicable mystery is this: to draw such a geographical map, highly advanced instruments and mathematical calculations are needed, none of which were available in Europe or Turkey in 1513.
The second "incredible" map is the one handed down to us by a meticulous German researcher, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), who explained that it was a copy of an Egyptian geographical map of the lost continent of Atlantis stolen by the Romans during the conquest of Egypt, and then rediscovered in the 17th century by the erudite Jesuit.
The extraordinariness of this map lies in the fact that the land depicted and labeled with a Latin inscription ("Site of the island of Atlantis, now under the sea, according to the belief of the Egyptians and the description of Plato") is actually Antarctica, presented with extreme care and details that modern scientists have only been able to discover in recent years. Since Antarctica is portrayed as completely ice-free on this ancient yet precise map, it is suspected that Kircher's map dates back to a time when this land was still warm and fertile, around 10,000 years before Christ.
The third extraordinary map is known as the "Map of Hadji Ahmed," discovered in 1559, which delineates the entire profile of the North American continent, highlighting areas that Europeans could only map for the first time two centuries later. Furthermore, even more astonishingly, this map from 1559 accurately applies the principles of latitude and especially longitude, which were not adopted until 1735.
But then how can one explain a map like that of Hadji Ahmed if, in 1559, the technology necessary to draw it had not yet been invented? The answer can only be that perhaps it was others... maybe precisely the advanced inhabitants of Atlantis... who drew the original map that Ahmed used to outline North America's contours... especially because even in this third "impossible" map, northern America is depicted not as it is today or as it was in 1559, but almost entirely covered in ice, exactly as geology has now indisputably demonstrated it was about 11 thousand years ago, precisely during the era when the mythical Atlantis is said to have existed – that Atlantis, so legendary but perhaps essential to understanding the existence of these three otherwise completely "impossible" geographical maps.
