originated with them.
Nordenskiöld then examined the role of Marinus of Tyre, a navigator who lived during the second century A.D. and was the predecessor of the famous Ptolemy.
Theodorus Meliteniota of Byzantium, from whom most of the information about the great scholar’s life is derived, suggests that Claudius Ptolemaus, popularly known as Ptolemy, was born in the Greek city of Ptolemais Hermii, and did most of his scientific, astronomical, and mathematical work in Alexandria. He was certainly making astronomical observations between the years A.D. 127 and 151, and may still have been working as late as 155. There is also an Arabian tradition that Ptolemy died at the age of seventy-eight.
From his studies of the portolanos, Nordenskiöld felt that the units of measurement used could not have been from a time later than that of Marinus of Tyre, and were probably far earlier. Comparing them with Ptolemy’s work, he saw clearly that the original source from which the portolanos had been copied was greatly superior.
To give Ptolemy the credit he richly deserves, he was the most famous geographer of his time. He had access to the greatest library of the ancient world, and all its geographical documents and records. He was a fine mathematician and posessed a modern, scientific attitude to the phenomena he observed and studied. As Hapgood so rightly argues in Maps of the Ancient Sea-Kings, it is very unlikely that medieval sailors during the fourteenth century without the advantages of Ptolemy’s reference library and high mathematical skills could have produced charts superior to his.
Assuming that it was the Carthaginians and Phoenicians who had access to much older and more accurate charts than Ptolemy was able to produce, and assuming again that these reappeared after an interval of well over a thousand years to form the basis of the portolanos, why did they vanish, and where might they have been hidden? The answer could lie in the grim and chronic struggle between Rome and Carthage known as the Punic Wars.
To understand the hatred and rivalry between these two great ancient powers, it is necessary to look briefly at their respective histories.
The first legend of the foundation of Rome relates how Aeneas, the Trojan prince, escaped from the ruin of Troy, married a Latin princess, and founded the city of Rome and the Julian Dynasty. The second legend concerns Romulus and Remus, descendants of Aeneas on their mother’s side, and, in the myth, the sons of Mars, god of war. Thrown into the Tiber by an unfriendly king of Latium, they drifted to Capitol Hill, were raised by a she-wolf, and founded Rome in 753 B.C. — a date from which all Roman history traditionally begins.
The most likely historical origin is that clusters of settlements on Rome’s seven hills got together to form a city state round about 1000 B.C. Having been involved in various battles with fierce Celtic neighbours and Gauls, “Rome conquered the world in self-defence!”
The Roman Empire was a great trading organization, and freedom of the seas was vitally important to her both commercially and militarily. The Carthaginians were the major maritime problem for Roman ships in the Mediterranean. It was inevitable that one power or the other would have to go down.
The history of Carthage begins with Phoenician colonists from Lebanon and Syria 1,600 kilometres to the east. Lacking the manpower to establish large settlements, they set up a few coastal cities as trading posts. The silver and tin of southern Spain were a great attraction for them. Phoenicians looked for places easily accessible from the sea but not open to hostile tribes from the hinterland: they liked offshore islands, rocky peninsulas, and sandy bays to facilitate beaching their ships. Carthage conformed to this pattern. It was also in a good position to expand into the fertile areas around it. The name itself derives from two Phoenician words kart hadasht, which means “new city.”
The implacable attitude separating the two great Mediterranean powers is clearly illustrated by the bitter words of the grim old Roman senator Marcus Porcius Cato (234–149 B.C.) “Delenda est Carthago” — “Carthage must be destroyed.”
The first Punic War (264–261 B.C.) started because of problems in Sicily. The second (218–201 B.C.) ended with Scipio Africanus’s triumph over Hannibal, the Carthaginian general at the epoch-making Battle of Zama in what is now Tunisia. The third and final round (149–146 B.C.) ended with the total destruction of Carthage and her people.
Did the precious old maps survive the destruction of Carthage, or were they safely onboard a Carthaginian ship that somehow evaded the Roman blockade and made its way east, back toward the old Phoenician homelands from which the ill-fated colony at Carthage had originally sprung?
It is interesting to speculate that if the precious and highly accurate old map did find its way back to the Middle East before the final destruction of Carthage, it could well have surfaced again during the Crusades, the period prior to 1307 during which the indomitable Templars were in the ascendancy. They were great sailors as well as great soldiers: were their successes at sea due in part to their possession of superior maps and charts, copied from highly accurate originals that predated the maritime Phoenicians and Carthaginians?
So one possible scenario suggests that some very ancient but unknown source produced maps of high quality, which in turn came into the hands of the Phoenicians, and passed from them — indirectly — to the Templars, and so to European navigators in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Where could the advanced technical knowledge behind those maps have come from in the first place? Assuming that Graham Hancock’s thoroughly researched and well-reasoned theories have the sound basis in fact that they certainly appear to have, then Antarctica would be as good a starting place as any.
If Hapgood’s deductions about the ability of continental land masses to slide over the Earth’s surface — that is, if the crust is able to move independently of the core beneath it — are correct, then areas that once occupied warm or temperate zones may find themselves relatively quickly inside polar circles, and vice versa.
Hapgood and his colleague, James Campbell, put forward the theory that the Earth’s crust rests on a very weak layer below — a layer that is virtually liquid. Following an idea suggested to them by Hugh Auchincloss Brown, an engineer, they investigated the possibility that a force powerful enough to move the entire crust of the Earth over this weak, quasi-liquid layer, could be generated by the mass of the polar ice-caps themselves, and their centrifugal effects arising from the Earth’s own rotation.
The centre of gravity of the Antarctic ice-cap, for example, is approximately 483 kilometres from the South Pole: “As the Earth rotates,” suggests Hapgood, “the eccentricity creates a centrifugal effect that works horizontally on the crust, tending to displace it toward the equator.”
Einstein himself supported this theory: in the introduction to Hapgood’s Earth’s Shifting Crust, Einstein wrote, “His (Hapgood’s) idea is original, of great simplicity, and — if it continues to prove itself — of great importance to everything that is related to the history of the Earth’s surface.”
Following Hapgood’s hypothesis, if there was an advanced civilization living on Antarctica before it moved into a polar position where it would rapidly become ice-locked, what would such people do to save themselves, their children, and their culture?
Such cataclysmic shifting of the Earth’s crust would inevitably be accompanied by dynamic geological and meteorological phenomena. There would be earthquakes, volcanic disturbances, fierce storms, destructive winds, and tidal waves. Those who could — those who had ships strong and buoyant enough to survive the devastation and the accelerating onset of the paralyzing cold — would head north toward warmer zones. Where might those fortunate few refugees and survivors have landed?
Heading north from all
