Another map of Antarctica, this time from 1531
The map of Oronce Finé
Charles Hapgood (and those derivative of him) used other maps allegedly showing Antarctica that are, at first sight, even more convincing than the Piri Re‘is map. The first of these is a product of Orontius Finaeus Delphinus (1494-1555), whom most Bad Archaeologists consistently and incorrectly refer to as Oronteus (more properly, his name was Oronce Fine or Finé, although the Latinised version seems to be in more common use, at least among the Bad Archaeologists). The map in question was published in 1531 and its supporters claim that it shows the continent at the correct scale, placing the Weddell and Ross Seas as well as Queen Maud Land, Wilkes Land and Marie Byrd Land in their correct longitudes. Again, if these claims are correct, they would display an even more remarkable knowledge of the continent than that supposedly (but demonstrably not) shown by Piri Re’is.
Although there are fairly obvious similarities between the general depiction of the southern continent by Orontius Finaeus and modern maps of Antarctica, they do not stand up to close scrutiny; indeed, there are more differences than similarities, much as one would expect from a map drawn without genuine knowledge of the southern continent! To show that Orontius’s Terra Australis corresponds to the outline of Antarctica, it was necessary for Hapgood to rotate the depiction by about twenty degrees, move the South Pole by 7½° (1,600 km) and alter the scale, as Terra Australis is 230% the size of Antarctica. Hapgood used this change in scale to explain the absence of the Antarctic Peninsula (Palmer Land), which he believed Orontius Finaeus had to omit from his map as it would have overlapped with South America at that scale; he explained that Finaeus confused latitude 80° south with the Antarctic Circle. Just as with his treatment of Piri’s map, Hapgood also had to shuffle whole sections of coastline to make them fit. It is unclear how the hypothesised original map had become fragmented and wrongly recombined; it is even more unclear how the fringe writers can go on to claim that various geographical features are shown in their correct places and at the correct scale. Again, these writers ignore what we know about the life of Oronce Fine.
The life of Oronce Fine (Oronce Finé, Orontius Finaeus, Oronteus Finaeus) (1494-1555)
Oronce Finé (1494-1555)
Not unexpectedly, given the way fringe writers tend to ignore inconvenient facts, a great deal is known about the biography of Oronce Fine. He was born in Briançon (France) in 1494 and educated in Paris. After a brief spell in prison in 1518, he earned a medical degree from the Collège de Navarre in Paris in 1522, although he was to follow a career as a mathematician. In 1524, he was once again in prison and in the same year built an ivory sundial that still exists. Like many mathematicians of the sixteenth century, Fine was considered an expert on fortifications and worked on the defences of Milan. In 1531, he was appointed to the chair of mathematics at the Collège Royal in Paris. He wrote voluminously on scientific subjects, his publications including treatises on astronomical instruments and astronomy (he suggested in 1520 that eclipses of the moon could be used to determine the longitude of places); he also invented a map projection, producing a map of the world in 1519 that emphasised it. He also drew the first domestically published map of France in 1525 and on his world map of 1531, the name Terra Australis appeared for the first time. It is this latter map that is popular with Bad Archaeologists. Other productions include works on arithmetic and geometry. In 1544, he calculated the value of π to be (22 2/9)/7, which he later refined to 47/15 and, in De rebus mathematicis of 1556, 3 11/78. In astronomy, he believed that the earth was at the centre of the universe (in common with most of his European contemporaries) and he built an astronomical clock based on this belief in 1553.
This is quite an interesting map. I suggest using a 3D rendering program like blender. Use the map as a texture for a sphere and align the longitude and latitude numbers. To do this you will have to cut it up in Photoshop. It will look a little distorted, but it will still resemble a globe very similar to our world with one key difference… mainly the Pacific Ocean. It’s tiny. Notice the icy-looking islands on the top of the globe next to “China.” Notice how Asia and North America are connected. There is no corresponding ice in the south, but there is no land either it is water. So perhaps this is ice and the lon/lat is incorrect, this part of the map was the north pole?
This is not the only map which looks this way, there is also the nearly-identical Mercator map. The infamous Piri Reis map actually fits better with the world looking this way. If you look at the Pacific Ocean floor, it looks as if a hole was ripped into the planet or something.
Something changed the Earth… changed its poles, expanded it, flooded it, or all of the above. This is supported by archaeological evidence. Mammoths with tropical stomach contents frozen as if the weather changed suddenly. Pottery and a house-building style in South America which matches one in the islands near Japan. A pyramid-ish structure carved into the rock complete with humanoid and feline statues submerged near a Japanese island and reminiscent of similar ones in that same area of South America. The aborigine have their own interesting Antediluvian tails. The name Austrailia.. Antaratica… Antediluvia.. Atlantis. Yeah I said it. It’s obvious. Plus there is the Aztlan in South America and the cache of interesting artifacts found in Ecuador that all glow in black light.
Something messed up the Pacific rim. That’s where we get call our flood stories from. It also ripped Australia off of Antarctica and now Antarctica is covered in ice stuck in the South Pole.
Debunk that. You can’t. All you can do is laugh and smear me as a nutter and a kook. I have my common sense and I know my heart is in the right place. The artifacts don’t lie, consensus and theoretical science and archaeology are the liars. This map is probably a copy of a similar one. We don’t know anything about our own history. Whatever knowledge survived was destroyed during the dark ages compliments of the Catholic Church.
Websites like these distort reality. Portray uncommon sense as common. Take advantage of scientific ignorance. Use smear tactics, weasel words, and rhetorical tricks and then say that is what pseudoscience uses. The truth hides in plain sight and it is unfortunate the majority of the world is too ignorant to see it. When you see it you cannot unsee it. Anybody passionate enough to create a website such cannot be a useful idiot either. They are part of the problem.
Unfortunately Suppressed Truth is pretty close to the mark. In is book “Finger Prints of the Gods” Graham Hancock goes through point by point how archaeological evidence has been suppressed and ignored simply because it does not fit into a Ph.D Museum archivists dissertation.
Consider that only a few generations ago Europe and the west believed the world to be flat. The Chinese knew it was not flat, their maps included most of the world including America which they had visited already, but the Europeans called people crazy who believed the world was round.
It is extremely unfortunate that the system under which we live completely suppresses any evidence or worldview that disagrees with it.
At least his website addresses it though, which is more than can be said of many academics. There are many Brazillian and South American museums and researchers who’s archaeological findings completely disagree with the currently established ideas, and that is all that they are, ideas.
If tomorrow the scientific community in the US/EU reversed their opinion, this website and others would be changed as well.
I am going to finish my second Masters degree and then will start on a Ph.D, and I can tell you from personal experience that my professors are just as blind as the Catholics who burned Galileo at the stake for daring to say the world is round. I have learned never to speak about what I really think about at Uni because professors will torpedo your grade if they learn that you have ideas that don’t agree with their world-view. When people tell me that the truth is being suppressed, I can believe it, because there is absolutely no disagreement in the academic setting.
Regardless of the evidence, if you write a paper that disagrees with the currently accepted worldview , you run the risk of losing both your academic standing and you position as a professor, and once that happens you’d be lucky to get a job at a community college, very luck.
You are utterly wrong.
If there is “Suppressed Truth”, how is it that Graham Hancock is able not just to publish it but to make a lot more money from it than mainstream academics? If his ideas were right, academics would be running to adopt them.
You’ve fallen for the myth that “only a few generations ago Europe and the west believed the world to be flat”; there is no evidence that this was the case and a lot to the contrary (Classical and medieval texts are full of references to orbis terrarum (‘the globe of the lands’) to refer to the earth, the monarch’s symbol of an orb surmounted by a cross represents the triumph of Christianity over the world, and a number of texts use the phenomenon of lunar eclipses as proof of the sphericity of the earth. It’s just wrong to say that it was believed that the earth was flat. The idea that the ”Europeans called people crazy who believed the world was round” is just plain wrong. You probably think that Columbus set out to prove otherwise.
The Chinese maps that you claim show “ most of the world including America” is wrong: where are these maps? Don’t be taken in by the unfounded assertions of Gavin Menzies, please!
Which “Catholics burned Galileo at the stake”? He may have been placed under house arrest, but he died a natural death! I really hope your proposed PhD isn’t in history, because you need to be more careful with your facts if it is…
As someone who has taught in a university, I would always give extra marks for original thought, so long as it was backed up by evidence. I’ve never seen anything being suppressed. Marking university level essays is more to do with the judging how the student has handled the evidence, understood the hypotheses of other people and is able to critique others’s ideas. You seem to be muddling university papers with school work, in which children are supposed to trot out a succession of ‘facts’; if university is about anything, it is about learning that knowledge does not depend on authority but on the ability to handle and understand evidence.
You missed his point while you attempted to deride his argument lol and I think he is right. Human civilization is much older than what is accepted and still taught in mainstream academic circles. Evidence seems to be pouring in yet very little of it sees to get much mainstream exposure or acceptance. And our understanding of certain ancient civilizations and their technologies is utterly incomplete. Mainstream archeology seems far more willing to accept these holes and move on with inadequate theories than consider the possibility that ancient Egyptians had knowledge of electrical power that could be harnessed without wires (as Tesla attempted to do before he was essentially ruined by JP Morgan who had a monopoly on copper wires for electrical transmission). Before you insist that everything I stated is incorrect – recall it was a university professor who told Tesla that AC motor was impossible. Have a nice day.
So where is all this evidence that, according to you is “pouring in” about the immense antiquity of human civilisation? In my day-to-day work, I deal with great piles of evidence in the form of stone tools, potsherds, animal bones, metal artefacts and so on, that come from excavations where we find the remains of walls, pits, turf banks, quarries and so on. It’s the data that comes from these excavations that help to add a few more details to the “utterly incomplete” picture we have of ancient societies. I can assure you that “[m]ainstream archeology” is not content “to accept these holes and move on with inadequate theories”!
But, if you want to propose that the Bronze Age Egyptians had knowledge of electricity, go ahead. Show the evidence that they possessed the power in the form of generators; that they used it in the form of artefacts that require electrical power for operation. If they had such things, it won’t be hard. Go on, show me!
And I know that the best you’ll be able to do is show me some reliefs from the Temple of Hathor at Dendera that date from the Hellenestic period. In other words, the centuries between the death of Alexander the Great and the conquest of Egypt by Octavian’s armies. A period that is well attested in ancient literature, a period where we have no mention of the Egyptians’ amazing technological wonders, a period for which the artefactual evidence is plentiful and contains not one single item that points to the generation and use of electrical power.
And if you want to interpret those reliefs as showing electrical Crooke’s tubes (or whichever electrical explanation is your favourite), you then have to explain all the other reliefs showing near identical designs that don’t look like electrical apparatus. You also have to explain why the texts that surround these reliefs don’t mention anything about electricity and why they instead go on about the journey of the sun god through the sky and under the earth.
But little details like that don’t really interest you, do they? You want the big picture, the astounding revelation. Minutiae, the careful work of scholars who spend their working lives dealing with one single, apparently insignificant problem, are not things that interest you.
And thanks for the irrelevant “recall it was a university professor who told Tesla that AC motor was impossible”. What’s that got to do with anything? And it’s not even true: AC generators had been developed in Europe in the 1850s: Tesla only started work on an AC generator for the Westinghouse company in 1888. No “university professor” told Tesla that an AC motor was impossible, as they had existed for years; you seem to be getting confused with the spat between Edison and Tesla, and Edison was not a “university professor”.
Why do so may critics of mainstream archaeology get such basic facts wrong, do you think?
“But, if you want to propose that the Bronze Age Egyptians had knowledge of electricity, go ahead. Show the evidence that they possessed the power in the form of generators; that they used it in the form of artefacts that require electrical power for operation. If they had such things, it won’t be hard. Go on, show me!”
Who says they needed electricity? Humans are selfish. This is why they used to believe Earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around it. This is why today that some people are not willing to accept that statistically we cannot be alone in this universe. Does that mean aliens are visiting and probing people? No it doesn’t. But it does throw a wrench into mainstream interpretation of Abrahamic beliefs.
So what makes you or anybody else think that an ancient advanced civilization needs to be like our current so-called advanced civilization? Why do they need Western-style electricity generators? What if there is an even simpler way to harness energy? One of Tesla’s last theories (which allegedly was also tied to a hypothetical energy weapon so the US classified much of his information to keep it away from the Soviets if you believe such a thing) was more or less about free energy extracted via hypothetical means which are scientifically thought to be impossible. Tesla also didn’t like Einstein’s theory of relativity. What if Einstein was wrong and science was pursuing a dead end?
When people ask “where is the evidence” for an advanced civilization, are they thinking about 2,000 year-old iPhone being discovered by archaeology in the desert or something? Why does it have to be like ours? This is a selfish belief. What if – for example – aircraft could be designed in a much less complex way to harness something like the Earth’s magnetic field? Science really doesn’t understand or even care about magnetism as much as they should. It is rarely discussed along side energy or gravity. Mention ‘perpetual motion’ and permanent magnets and watch the big oil shills come out from nowhere and smear you with personal attacks despite the fact that it isn’t exactly a stupid idea. But as long as the oil corporations are in business, you can forget about it. Forget about that, forget about even researching viable alternatives, and definitely forget about free or near-free energy. They have the means to make it appear you are not to be taken seriously (money… lots of it).
So what if ancient civilization had figured out how to harness something like magnetism in a way we don’t think to be possible? Mostly because we don’t think. We don’t have time to think for ourselves. Hardly anybody thinks outside the box. If you do, you are labeled a nutter or a kook. Or ‘fringe’ which is my favorite term. What if they made primitive magnetic (or whatever) gliders that function more efficiently than airplanes? Proof of an ancient civilization are the so-called Baghdad Battery (which science cannot explain, they only have unprovable theories) or my favorite the Antikythera mechanism. If they found these three hundred or so years ago, they most certainly would have been advanced by then-modern standards. It would’ve been akin to finding an iPhone in the desert today.
The problem is selfishness. The West is selfish. The West discovered the ‘new world’ which if you do your homework was known of for centuries.. just not to the West. Western society and Western Dumbocracy is controlled by an unelected level of folks primarily in the finance industry. The big corporations (pharma, oil, entertainment) also have a lot of pull in terms of using their pocket book. Money, blackmail, whatever it takes. The masses do not understand that their politicians were pre-selected and their public opinion was instilled upon by the will of a third party. Sure the system could in theory work, you just have to play by the rules. They make the rules. They are above the law. They write the laws. This is how society works. It is not difference for science.
If you are a scientist in a specific field of research that the ruling class and government is interested in because it relates to an agenda they can use to either tax us or limit our rights, the results are going to be biased in favor of those with the most money. If you are a scientist who has been made famous by a theory and/or your students (and yourself) profit from this heavily, that’s great. But what if somebody comes along with an alternative that makes your theory worthless. It jeopardizes your claim to fame and your income, so they smear the alternative as ‘pseudo-science’
This has gone on for centuries. Flat Earth, Galileo, this same sort of thing happens today. Corporations, lobbies, central banks, the fiance and entertainment industries all steer the establishment. Even science. Theoretical science is based on consensus, but the consensus might be based upon a financial interest to keep a majority consensus less an alternative appear as a threat to the status quo.
Once you being to realize the way of things, it is not pretty. Our society is completely dumbed down from our ‘primitive’ ancestors. Oh those ancients and their pagan beliefs. They worshiped the sun and phalluses… Oh they weren’t much different than animals. Really? You believe that? Ever read the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Vedas? These people were creative and intelligent. Maybe not at our level of technology, but look what that does. Information at your fingertips and high school grads are dumber than ever before.
Which brings me back to this map. The following sentence sets up the deceptive and persuasive rhetoric by the skeptic:
Not unexpectedly, given the way fringe writers tend to ignore inconvenient facts
Inconvenient facts and fringe writers. We’ve already been setup for failure. Not even Wikipedia smears Oronce Fine, and that says a lot. Here is an inconvenient fact: Western Civilization is founded on a lie. The Jesuits are responsible for a lot of our history and they made it up. Some of the things they teach you about ancient history in grade school are the same events told different and applied to different eras when in reality they are the same thing. READ! Research! Don’t just blindingly be skeptical of everything. If you don’t research or if you accept the mainstream official story at face value, you are foolish. I’m not asking you to believe in unicorns or holographic 9/11 planes or alien races in control of the planet. I’m asking that you use critical thinking and spend some time to do independent research while thinking outside of the box. Don’t believe anything, don’t settle on any one opinion religiously as IDIOTS and KOOKS like to do, and don’t trust official history above anything because liars can only be trusted to tell lies.
Why are skeptics so passionately skeptical anyways? Normal people don’t act like that. I don’t go out of my way to tell the flat Earth believers they are nuts. Or the Bosnian pyramid believers that they are mountains. Regarding the latter, the fact that there are people who do and they use the same deceptive rhetorical tricks is reason for me to believe they are hiding something. Because again NORMAL PEOPLE ARE NOT RELIGIOUSLY SKEPTICAL like this.
Look at Google Earth, the Pacific Ocean takes up half the Earth’s surface for the most part. It was NOT ALWAYS THERE. This is an incoveniant fact. These maps are partially copies of ancient sources. Something nasty happened and if anybody knows the truth they are hiding it. This is not a fringe belief, but if you want to laugh it off without doing research, you’re a fool. I don’t know what created the Pacific Ocean, but I have a feeling it is responsible for flood myths. Even the ‘mythical’ Hyperborea is real and you can also see it in google earth. Compare Mercator’s map to Greenland and the surrounding area. The Baffin Bay is the center of Hyperborea and the Hudson bay is STILL the Earth’s magnetic north pole just as the Mercator map eludes to.
The Western establishment and a good portion of our history is nonsense from a selfish group of people who want to be the first when somebody was already first, second, third, etc. They stole a birthright from some group of people I will not name, but I suggest you do your homework. Don’t avoid skeptical sites like this, some of the info is good to read. In this case, not so much. This map is one of the most important surviving clues to our ancient world.
As someone who has taught in a university, I would always give extra marks for original thought, so long as it was backed up by evidence. I’ve never seen anything being suppressed. Marking university level essays is more to do with the judging how the student has handled the evidence, understood the hypotheses of other people and is able to critique others’s ideas.
No offense, but the “someone who has taught in a university” line sounds narcissistic. I have a degree in computer science and clashed with many instructors and professors because if they were so smart and knowledgeable about what they were teaching, how come they weren’t working in the field? I would selfishly even proclaim my knowledge has usurped theirs just as I ‘arrogantly’ thought back then. I was right.
When you speak of handling evidence, what do you mean? Is circumstantial evidence dismissed? Is this a murder trial? Circumstantial evidence is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. With enough of it, you know what the picture looks like. That’s not good enough for a court of law, but the criminal justice system is flawed in favor of the ruling class. Justice is blind, and the authorities don’t have an intuition at all. Maybe being closer to 100% would be important if a life was on the line like again a murder trial.
As somebody who never even cared about this stuff two years ago, it’s interesting to look at the skeptics from outside the box and realize they use many of the same tactics. Most of them have to do with persuasion and manipulation. They also show symptoms of Psychopathy proven via Hare’s checklist. So IMO, what if you are a professional/pathological liar? Because you exhibit some of the symptoms of psychopathy. Manipulative rhetoric, weasel words, narcissism… “I am an educated (by the conditioning system) instructor in an educational facility (big deal) which makes me an expert (no it doesn’t)”
History has been suppressed. Either that or lost and forgotten and what little remained distorted by religious nutters or political/financial agendas. If you believe the official version of history at face value, then there is no point trying to convince you otherwise. Only you can convince yourself. If you don’t want to, that’s your problem. I can’t tell if you are a shill or a useful idiot. Either way, I pity you
Regarding Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews’ last sentence, “Why do so may critics of mainstream archaeology get such basic facts wrong, do you think?”
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That’s easy! When dealing with a complicated subject such as history covering millennia we introduce so many factors, interpretations and good old-fashioned legends that the pure massiveness of the subject makes accurate measurements mere interpretation.
It can be said that time doesn’t exist without a measurement. Similarly, in a courtroom a “measurement” that has been recorded becomes truth. An example is a picture with a date on it or a police officer’s measurement with a tape measure written in a report. Any scientist knows that the accuracy of the measurement can’t be reliable without scrupulous testing and even with the testing we only reach a theory!
Pardon my diatribe, but this is what fascinates me about history, culture, and beliefs. Simply put, facts change. Our thoughts on the accuracy of archaeology will certainly change as the scrutiny of our peers introduce ideas.
Back to Keith’s question, my opinion is that because it’s easy to make up bull crap to support preconceived thoughts on history.
In other words, there are a bunch of idiots on earth.