Product Description

Charles Hapgood's classic 1966 book on ancient maps is back in print after 20 years. Hapgood produces concrete evidence of an advanced worldwide civilisation existing many thousands of years before ancient Egypt. He has found the evidence in many beautiful maps long known to scholars. Hapgood concluded that these ancient mapmakers were in some ways much more advanced in mapmaking than any people prior to the 18th century. It appears they mapped all the continents. The Americas were mapped thousands of years before Columbus. Antarctica was mapped when its coasts were free of ice. There is evidence that these people must have lived when the Ice Age had not yet ended in the Northern Hemisphere and when Alaska was still connected with Siberia by the Pleistocene, Ice Age 'land bridge'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16281 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 315 pages

Customer Reviews

A credible map of Antartica in the 16th Century
"Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings", Hapgood. I read this book when it was first published...must have been 30 years ago. What I remember most was an ancient map of tne continent of Antartica, published in 1509, but with an outline amazingly close to what the continent was recently shown to be late in the 20th Century. The map was published by a French cartographer who had no notion of Antartica. In addition to its inexplicable similarity to the Antartica that we know, the margins of the continent are shown to be free of ice, and across this landscape rivers flowing from the frozen center down to the sea. It has always been assumed, I imagine, that Antartica has been covered with its two mile thick ice sheet for millions of years. But last year Discovery magazine reported that a scientist, working in Antartica claimed to have evidence that the southernmost continent had been partially ice free in recent times, recent meaning sometime in the Pleistocene. There is also in this unusual book a strange map of Europe as it might have been seen during the last Ice Age from a vantage point somewhere in space. In this map, also produced in the early 16th Century, the sun is shown glinting off the ice cap that covers all the northern European countries. Since the 16th Century knew nothing of ice ages, you can't help but wonder who was around, say twenty five thousand years ago with the technology and the desire to make maps whose accuracy would not be duplicated again until our own age. Along this line, who was around, a few years ago an English engineer wrote a book called, "The history of Metrology", which is the study of measuring things. In his research through the old world, he discovered that some of these ancient peoples, the Greeks, the Romans, the Assyrians, for instance, used a measure of length that was a geo-physical reality, like our nautical mile. In other words, these ancient units of length were a segment of a mean circumference of the earth, or a segment of a "! ;greater circle" and not an arbitrary measure "from the king's nose to the king's finger". Since all these people had to be unaware that their unit of length had a special geographical significance, the author of the book assumed that they had inherited their systems from some unknown culture in the distant past. Again, who? It's a thought provoking book, "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings". Were there some technologically sophisticated people around at a time when other men were painting horses on cave walls?

Not perfect but deserves to be taken seriously
While Hapgood's "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings" is not as thoroughly scientific and impeccably argumented as many readers seem to think (mbulger@fred.fhcrc.org from Seattle has correctly pointed out many weak points in the book), it does seem to be an honest piece of work and one might say that the facts Hapgood has gathered for our appreciation are too numerous and too peculiar to be plainly dismissed as sheer coincidence or the caprices of imaginative mapmakers. No matter how one decides to link these facts or interpret them they do constitute evidence for some past reality modern historians have generally failed to recognize.

Much of the problem lies in our unwillingness to attribute a normal human status and intelligence to our forefathers, let alone a refined and complex spiritual life. Our blind faith in the positivist creed of continuous progress has made us think of human beings living fifty, ten or even five thousand years ago as fierce and stupid brutes dragging their females around by the hair and killing each other for a piece of meat. Though vividly painted in our imagination, nothing could be more wrong.

What makes us truly human is not the presence in our society of microscopes and spaceshuttles but our possession of three inalienable prerequisites, namely theomorphism, transcendental intelligence and free will [F. Schuon]. In their wisdom many (but not all) peoples of the past (and some of the present) chose not to dwell in heavy, stone-erected urban settings and, in view of their sacred and ritual outlook, did not find it attractive or particularly "human" to engage in an unchecked and unwholesome development of machinery and commerce (like the one our present humanity has produced for itself). Consequently, one should not expect automatic weapons and spark plugs to be common occurrences in archeological excavations (of course, they wouldn't be recognizable as such for long, either).

Another thing which makes it hard to verify Hapgood's claims is what René Guénon used to call "the time barrier" (actually the starting point of what some traditions term "the iron age" or even "the dark age") at approximately 4,500 B.C. For some unexplained reason historians call the time prior to this barrier "Pre-history" while every cultural phenomenon in it is ascribed to "legend" (so let historians admit that if History is something that can begin at a specific time it must be the History of something likewise specific). Another and lesser time barrier at around 600 B.C. - when vast reformulations of world traditions occurred - is about as far as they are able to date any event unequivocally.

Thus, if Hapgood's source maps really contained vestiges of rivers and mountains on now ice-covered land masses they would necessarily have been drawn by civilizations from the "legendary period" prior to Guénon's time barrier. Such civilizations are now all but inaccessible to conventional scientific research, so I think Hapgood's hard work and partial success in bringing at least fragments of such evidence to light deserves our recognition - and more than two stars!

More knowledge has been forgotten than we realize
The discovery of an ancient map in Turkey, upon which Christopher Columbus was said to have relied, turns out to show the coastlines of Antarctica and Greenland in such exact detail that the maps must have been created (1) thousands of years ago, at least 5000 or more, before the two island continents were covered with ice, (2) by a sea-faring people with the ability to measure longitude, which was recently "discovered" in the 1700s, trigonometric skills, and other non-obvious mathematical know-how. In short, proof that there were ancient peoples that knew a great deal more than was passed down through the ages. A straightforward telling of how Hapgood and his students pieced together the evidence for the existence of ancient civilization, based on the ancient maps they could locate.