Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A credible map of Antartica in the 16th Century, 30 May 1998
By A Customer
"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?
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not perfect but deserves to be taken seriously, 3 Mar 1999
By A Customer
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!
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hapgood"s writing style is dry; his content is fascinating., 18 Jun 1999
By A Customer
Hapgood presents crucial evidence that libraries of ancient Greece and Constantinople held accurate maps of the New World, the west coast of North America, and of the Antarctic prior to the twelfth century. These maps were made with mathematical formulae that were not rediscovered until the 1600s. The clear implication being that someone in the dim past had possessed the knowledge and the ability to accurately map the entire world, not just the ancient "known world." The Antarctic coast is detailed without the current ice covering. Modern technology allows the ice sheet to be penetrated to confirm the accuracy of this ancient map. As the original libraries and their contents were destroyed, the copies of those seminal maps, stored elsewhere, became the primary sources for subsequent sailors and explorers. Many of the maps' details were lost or distorted over time due to repeated copying, but the essence of the original accurate mapping remains to this day.
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