July 17, 2012
extracted from 'Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings' by Charles Hapgood

from AncientDestructions Website

The Oronteus Finaeus map

(Oronteus Fineus map)

shows an ice free Antarctica.
 

As well as the Piri Reis map there exists another anomaly.

The Oronteus Finaeus map, also spelled Oronteus Fineus map, was incredibly precise. It too shows an ice free Antarctica with no ice-cap. It was drawn in the year 1532.

There are also maps showing Greenland as two separated islands, as it was confirmed by a polar French expedition which found out that there is an ice cap quite thick joining what it is actually two islands.

Another amazing chart is the one drawn by the Turkish Hadji Ahmed, year 1559, in which he shows a land stripe, about 1600 Km wide, that joins Alaska and Siberia.

Such a natural bridge has been then covered by the water due to the end of the glacial period, which rose up the sea level.
 

As we saw, many charts in the ancient times pictured, we might say, all the earth geography.

They seem to be pieces of a very ancient world wide map, drawn by unknown people who were able to use technology that we consider to be a conquer of the very modern times.

At a time when human beings were supposedly living in a primitive manner, someone "put on paper" the whole geography of the earth.

And this common knowledge somehow fell into pieces, then gathered here and there by several people, who had lost though the knowledge, and just copied what they could find in libraries, bazaars, markets and about all kind of places.

Charles Hapgood made a disclosure which amazingly lead further on this road:

he found out a cartographic document copied by an older source carved on a rock column, China, year 1137.

It showed the same high level of technology of the other western charts, the same grid method, the same use of spheroid trigonometry.

It has so many common points with the western ones that it makes think more than reasonably, that there had to be a common source:

Could it be a lost civilization, maybe the same one which has been chased by thousands for years so far?

Oronteus Fineus map of Antarctica summary

The Piri Re'is map is often exhibited in cases seeking to prove that civilization was once advanced and that, through some unknown event or events, we are only now gaining any understanding of this mysterious cultural decline.

The earliest known civilization, the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, appear out of 'nowhere' around 4,000 B.C. but have no nautical or maritime cultural heritage.

They do, however, speak reverently of ancestral people who were like the "gods" and were known as the Nefilim.

Here is a summary of some of the most unusual findings about the map:

Scrutiny of the map shows that the makers knew the accurate circumference of the Earth to within 50 miles.

The coastline and island that are shown in Antarctica must have been navigated at some period prior to 4,000 B.C. when these areas were free of ice from the last Ice Age.

 

Piri Reis own commentary indicates that some of his source maps were from the time of Alexander the Great (332 B.C.)

The Oronteus Finaeus Map of Antarctica redrawn on the modern equidistant azimuthal polar projection, compares with the modern map of Antarctica on the same projection (Christian Science Monitor).

A comparison of the Oronteus Fineus Map with the map of the sub glacial land surfaces of Antarctica produced by survey teams or various nations during the International Geophysical Year (1958) seems to explain some of the apparent short-comings of the ice free Antarctica Oronteus Finaeus Map, and at the same time throws some light on the question of the probable extent of glacial conditions when the original maps were drawn.

In 1959, however, in the Library of Congress, Hapgood noticed a presumably authentic map that instantly wiped out his doubts:

a map of what was almost certainly Antarctica, done in 1531 by the French cartographer Oronce Fine, also known as Oronteus Finaeus.

To even the most skeptical, the Oronteus Finaeus map is startling. Although it was printed in a book in 1531 - and was thus not subject to subsequent amendment - it is remarkably similar to today's maps of Antarctica.

Admittedly it is too close to the tip of South America, and it is incorrectly oriented, yet the proportions seem similar, the coastal mountains, found in the 1957 geophysical study are in roughly the right places and so are many bays and rivers.

Furthermore, the shape of South America itself seems right, and the close resemblance between a modern, scientifically exact map of the Ross Sea and Finaeus' unnamed gulf is striking.

What is different, however, is that the Oronteus Finaeus map does not seem to show the great shelves of ice that, today, surround the continent, nor the great glaciers that fringe the coastal regions. Instead there seem to be estuaries and inlets, suggesting great rivers.

To Hapgood and his team, that meant that at some time in the past the Ross Sea and its coasts - scene of the November, 1979 air disaster on Mount Erebus - and some of the hinterland of Antarctica were free of ice.

It also suggested to Hapgood that since the Antarctic was certainly ice-bound in 1531 - when Oronteus Finaeus made his map - Finaeus must have had access to very ancient maps indeed:

maps made when Antarctica was largely free of the mile-thick ice cap that buries it today, and presumably has covered it for millennia.

There is, moreover, the perplexing problem of the Oronteus Finaeus map.

Even if Piri Reis "Antarctica" turns out to be South America - drawn horizontally - or even Australia, the Finnaeus "Antarctica" is surely Antarctica and his map was also drawn in the 16^th century: 1531.

• Where did Oronteus Finaeus get his far more detailed and accurate information?

• Was it the libraries of Alexandria now buried under the sea?

• And why does Finaeus also show Antarctica without an ice cap?

Furthermore, the Hapgood team identified 50 geographical points on the Finaeus map, as re-projected, whose latitudes and longitudes were located quite accurately in latitude and longitude, some of them quite close to the pole.

"The mathematical probability against this being accidental," says Hapgood, "is astronomical"

So how did this happen to be recorded in not one but at least four maps?

Either our "known" history of human beings on this planet is wrong, our 'history' of our planet's development is wrong, there were highly developed civilizations on Earth that we are ignoring because it doesn't fit into the established "norm" or the ancient maps that predated these and were used as reference were done by alien cartographers or someone - drawing our planet from the air.

Another tidbit of proof is the Ross sea.

Today huge glaciers feed into it, making it a floating ice shelf hundreds of feet thick. Yet this map and the Reis map show estuaries and rivers at the site.

In 1949 coring was done to take samples of the ice and sediment at the bottom of the Ross Sea.

They clearly showed several layers of stratification, meaning the area went through several environmental changes. Some of the sediments were of the type usually brought down to the sea by rivers.

Tests done at the Carnegie Institute in Washington DC, which date radioactive elements found in sea water, dated the sediments at about 4000 BC, which would mean the area was ice free with flowing rivers up until that time - exactly what is recorded on the Reis and Oronteus Finaeus maps probably from the libraries of Alexandria.

To put it another away, Hapgood's work simply cannot be lumped with the lunatic fringe. Although unquestionably an amateur theoretician, he did do his homework and had it thoroughly checked by professionals.

The U.S. Air Force SAC cartographers, for example, worked with him for two years and fully endorsed his conclusions about Antarctica.