3 Strange Ancient maps that shouldn’t exist
The age of exploration began during the 1400s and by the late 1600s the vast majority of the world had been mapped. During this time the best that people had to work with were rather basic tools that would show a persons position at sea using the stars, which worked to an extent but mistakes were certainly made. In the early days of map making California was thought to be an island, there was a large continent shown on various maps above the UK and hundreds of other smaller mistakes, but some of these maps show more than they should for their date of creation, so here’s a look at some of the most mysterious and confusing.
Piri Reis map
The Piri Reis map was created in 1513 by a Turkish Admiral and Cartographer named Piri Reis. The map was created in an attempt to make a world map and was made using dozens of other maps and scrolls taken from foreign and domestic libraries and ship captains. Only a third of the map survives today but it shows a number of territories with surprising accuracy, including the western coasts of Europe and Africa along with the eastern coast of South America.
The thing that makes this map strange is that it shows what appears to be the coast line of Antarctica, and marked on the map is a number of features like farm locations, rivers and settlements. It also appears to show that the furthest southern point of South America is attached to Antarctica, an easy mistake to make for early mapmakers, but considering how accurate the rest of this map is, it seems highly unlikely that such a large area of land is included with marked features over a distance of hundreds of miles because someone simply made a mistake.
The Stone aged egg map
In Yorkshire, England lives an amateur archaeologist by the name of David King who has been studying the Paleolithic period for over 20 years. During that time he’s collected over 10,000 artifacts from the era and spent countless hours learning about life during this Stone Age period. One day while out looking for artifacts he came across a 4.5 inch tall pebble with what he believes to have an ancient map engraved on it. The stone itself is between 500,000 and 1 million years old and seems to have been engraved for an equal amount of time.
Mr king claims the stone shows parts of Eastern Europe including a number of rivers and the coast lines of modern day France, Spain and the UK as well as parts of Germany. He has had various people look at the stone who mostly agree that it is indeed between 500,000 and 1 million years old, but they also claim that the markings on the stone are just a coincidence. Some of the river markings show rivers that existed at the time but have since changed, like the river Eridanos which flowed between the Baltic and North Sea up until 700,000 years ago. There are a number of other interesting geographical references on the stone, but it seems it will forever be unknown if it was made or a just a massive coincidence.
The Buache Map
This map was named after its creator Philippe Buache who made the map on September 3, 1739. The full title of the map is “ Carte des Terres Australes comprises entre le Tropique du Capricorne et le Pôle Antarctique où se voyent les nouvelles découvertes faites en 1739 au Sud du Cap de Bonne Esperance ,” which in English translates to “Map of the Southern Lands contained between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Antarctic Pole, where the new discoveries made in 1739 to the south of the Cape of Good Hope may be seen.”
The reason this map makes the list is because it again shows the continent of Antarctica without ice, leading to speculation that the Buache map is made from some very ancient maps he managed to acquire somehow. An interesting thing about this map is that it apparently matches the sub-glacial layout of the continent today, a claim disputed between researchers who claim no one knows for sure what the ground layout actually looks like. Considering how accurate the rest of the map is for the time it was created, it seems like a pretty big mistake that such a large amount of land could be mapped with distance markings and place names all because of a blunder. Most modern projections of Antarctica do indeed show the continent to be made up of two main landmasses, with the western mass considerably bigger than the eastern one, just like in the map.