Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

  I anticipate the objection that it is inconceivable for a mapmaking tradition to have survived for 11,000 years. But why should it be inconceivable? Don’t we already have in Ptolemy a mapmaking tradition that has survived – verifiably -for 2000 years? And doesn’t Ptolemy himself state that his Geography is a correction of the earlier work of Marinus of Tyre, who in turn was supposedly only the ‘most recent student’ of this ancient discipline? Nothing compels us to imagine, therefore, that the ‘Marinus’ tradition began with Marinus a few decades before Ptolemy. On the contrary, Ptolemy’s references suggest that Marinus of Tyre (if this was not actually a generic term that was used to refer to a certain category of nautical maps) was simply the latest custodian and redactor of a body of geographical knowledge preserved from a far more remote antiquity.

  Perhaps it was their custodianship of this knowledge that made the Phoenicians such inquisitive explorers of the margins of the Atlantic (which later navigators feared and called ‘the Sea of Darkness’)4 as though they were searching, always searching, for something that lay just beyond the next horizon …

  Hints of a lost Atlantic geography

  According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BC,

  There lies out in the deep off Libya [Africa] an island of considerable size, and situated as it is in the ocean it is distant from Libya a voyage of a number of days to the west. Its land is fruitful, much of it being mountainous and not a little being a level plain of surpassing beauty. Through it flow navigable rivers …5

  Diodorus goes on to tell us how Phoenician mariners, blown off course in a storm, had discovered this Atlantic island with navigable rivers quite by chance. Soon its value was recognized and its fate became the subject of dispute between Tyre and Carthage, two of the great Phoenician cities in the Mediterranean:

  The Tyrians … purposed to dispatch a colony to it, but the Carthaginians prevented their doing so, partly out of concern lest many inhabitants of Carthage should remove there because of the excellence of the island, and partly in order to have ready in it a place in which to seek refuge against an incalculable turn of fortune, in case some total disaster should overtake Carthage. For it was their thought that since they were masters of the sea, they would thus be able to move, households and all, to an island which was unknown to their conquerors.6

  Since there are no navigable rivers anywhere to the west of Africa before the seafarer reaches Cuba, Haiti and the American continent,7 does this report by Diodorus rank as one of the earliest European notices of the New World?

  Likewise, what did Lucius Annaeaus Seneca have in mind in his Medea (C.AD 50) when he wrote:

  In later years there will come a time when Oceanus [the Atlantic] shall loosen the bonds by which we have been confined, when an immense land shall be revealed and Tiphys [the pilot of Jason’s legendary ship Argo] shall disclose new worlds.8

  Seneca’s strange observation reads like a weirdly accurate prophecy of the inevitable discovery of the Americas. But is it too accurate to be guesswork? Had he seen a map that showed an immense land literally waiting to be revealed on the far shores of the Atlantic?

  The opposite continent

  The suspicion that certain ancient authorities possessed good knowledge of the real shape of the Atlantic and its islands, and of the lands on both sides of it, must also arise from any objective reading of Plato’s world-famous account of Atlantis.

  As we have seen in earlier chapters, this story is set around 11,600 years ago – a date that coincides with a peak episode of global flooding at the end of the Ice Age. The story tells us that ‘the island of Atlantis was swallowed up by the sea and vanished’, that this took place in ‘a single dreadful day and night’ and that the event was accompanied by earthquakes and floods that were experienced as far away as the eastern Mediterranean.9 But of more immediate interest to us here is what Plato has to say about the geographical situation in the Atlantic immediately before the flood that destroyed Atlantis:

  In those days the Atlantic was navigable. There was an island opposite the strait [the Strait of Gibraltar] which you [the Greeks] call the Pillars of Heracles, an island larger than Libya and Asia combined; from it travellers could in those days reach the other islands, and from them the whole opposite continent which surrounds what can truly be called the ocean. For the sea within the strait we are talking about [i.e. the Mediterranean] is like a lake with a narrow entrance; the outer ocean is the real ocean and the land which entirely surrounds it is properly termed continent … On this island of Atlantis had arisen a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings who ruled the whole island; and many other islands as well, and parts of the continent …10

  Whether or not one believes that an island called Atlantis ever existed in the Atlantic Ocean, Plato’s clear references to an ‘opposite continent’ on the far side of it are geographical knowledge out of place in time. It is hard to read in these references anything other than an allusion to the Americas, and yet historians assure us that the Americas were unknown in Plato’s time and remained ‘undiscovered’ (except for a few inconsequential Viking voyages) until Columbus in 1492.

  The mysterious book of Columbus

  A curious anteroom to the Columbus story exists. It is prefigured in the Irish legend of the voyage of Saint Brendan – the earliest surviving version of which appears in Adamnan’s Life of St Columba, written before AD 704.11 Brendan is said to have sailed across the Atlantic from Ireland in the sixth century AD with a group of monks on an eventually successful expedition to find ‘an immense region in the west … the Land of Promise’.12

  Once again we are reminded that the ancient seafaring nations of Europe and the Mediterranean were imbued through and through with the same geographical idea that enlightened Plato – the idea that a rich and almost limitless opposite continent awaited those daring enough to attempt the Atlantic crossing. And once again the obvious questions arise. Where could the idea of the opposite continent have come from? Why should it have arisen in the first place? How do we account for its persistence down the ages in so many different cultures from the Phoenicians to the Irish?

  In 1513, in handwritten notes on an enigmatic map that he had prepared showing the newly discovered Americas, the Turkish Admiral Piri Reis offered an intriguing answer to all these questions – at any rate for the particular case of Christopher Columbus, the most recent and most renowned of the ancient Atlantic dreamers. Piri’s note, one of many on the same map, is written over the interior of Brazil:

  Apparently a Genoese infidel, by the name of Columbus was the one who discovered these parts. This is how it happened: a book came into the hands of this Columbus from which he found out that the Western Sea [i.e. the Atlantic] has an end, in other words that there is a coast and islands on its western side with many kinds of ores and gems. Having read this book through, he recounted all these things to the Genoese elders and said, ‘Come, give me two ships, and I shall go and find these places. ‘They said, ‘Foolish man, is there an end to the Western Sea? It is filled with the mists of darkness.’13

  It seems to me that there are two points of enormous interest about this reported ‘book’ of Columbus. First, we are told that it showed the opposite continent, with its coast and islands, on the western side of the Atlantic. Taken at face value, therefore, what we have here is a clear reference to the existence of a pre-Columbian map of the Americas – a notion that runs completely contrary to the accepted history of science. Secondly, we are led to understand that it was on account of what he had learned in this remarkable book – no other cause is mentioned – that Columbus began to tout his proposed expedition to potential sponsors.

  One might question the bona fides of a Turkish admiral claiming to have any inside knowledge at all of the voyages of Christopher Columbus; however, in this case such questions appear to be misplaced. Recent scholarship by map historian Gregory Mcintosh has confirmed that one of the twenty or so source maps to which Piri Reis
tells us that he referred to compile his own map was almost certainly – as Piri claims – a chart of the Caribbean that had been drawn by Columbus himself.14 The implication is that some fairly direct link must have existed between the two men and Piri informs us of such a link. He says that he acquired his inside information about Columbus from a Spaniard captured by Turkish corsairs after a naval battle in the Mediterranean. This ‘Spanish prisoner’, as Piri calls him, had sailed with Columbus on three of his four voyages to the New World.15

  Piri Reis map, 1513.

  Piri’s reference to the mysterious ‘book’ of Columbus can therefore be traced back to a reliable source. But I have yet to find a single orthodox map scholar, Gregory Mcintosh included, prepared to look further into the potentially controversial and important revelation that the book contained a pre-Columbian map of the Americas. On the contrary, the revelation is dismissed as manifestly incorrect. In consequence those few scholars who have devoted any thought at all to the ‘book’ have ignored the one definite lead that Piri gives us about it -namely that it showed how the Atlantic Ocean came to an end in an opposite continent with its own coast and islands – and instead have speculated that it might have been a copy of Cardinal D’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, or of Marco Polo’s Travels: ‘books which influenced Columbus’s plan of sailing west to reach Asia’.16 To this Gregory Mcintosh adds: ‘In the Bahriye Piri Reis refers to the book that influenced Columbus in terms that indicate it may have been Ptolemy’s Geographia.’17

  Needless to say, the orthodox paradigm of the discovery of the New World is safe if the mysterious ‘book’ that supposedly motivated Columbus can be reduced to a known, non-threatening quantity like the Geography or the Travels. And it is possible, since all the texts named above recognize the earth to be a sphere, that any one of them, and probably all of them, might have played a part in shaping Columbus’s well-known conviction that Asia could be fetched by sailing west from Europe.

  None of this, however, permits the conclusion that the ‘book of Columbus’ to which Piri Reis refers was in fact one of these texts. Indeed, though the point is passed over in silence by Mcintosh, it seems extremely unlikely that it could have been. The named texts were already well known in Europe when Columbus was seeking support for his expedition and were not viewed by anybody as proof positive that either a New World, or Asia, lay on the other side of the Atlantic. If all he had to impress sponsors was information that they already had at their disposal from those texts, then he would not have convinced anyone. In other words, if there was a ‘book of Columbus’ which played the important part that Piri gives to it, then it must have been a much rarer and less familiar text than any of these and it must logically have contained new and more persuasive information about the far coasts of the Atlantic.

  Why not take Piri at face value?

  Piri Reis is not only remembered for his 1513 map but for another slightly later work, a manual of sailing directions known as the Bahriye, which also contains references to the book of Columbus.18 Reported above is Mcintosh’s impression from comments made in the Bahriye that the ‘book’ Piri is speaking of might have been Ptolemy’s Geography. Yet the Turkish scholar Svat Soucek points out that this is not the obvious deduction from the text of the Bahriye where it touches on ‘the great story of the discovery of America’:

  The country’s name is Antilia, and it was discovered by a Genoese muneccim (astronomer-cum-astrologer) named Columbus … The story goes all the way back to Alexander, who had roamed the whole earth and written a book about it. The book remained in Egypt until the Muslim conquest, when the Franks fled the country, taking the book with them. Little attention was paid to it until Columbus read it and realized the existence of Antilia to the west of the Atlantic. He convinced the king of Spain of the possibility of its discovery and colonization, which he then successfully carried out.19

  I find it difficult to agree with Mcintosh that Piri might have had Ptolemy’s Geography in mind as the book that inspired Columbus – for the Geography consists of dry and uninspiring coordinates mapping out the Oikumene (the inhabited world as known to the ancient Greeks) and has nothing to say one way or the other about the western terminus of the Atlantic nor of any place such as Antilia. Moreover, Mcintosh’s conclusion requires us to ignore Piri’s own very clear and unambiguous attribution of the original authorship of the ‘book’ to Alexander the Great and to accept instead that when Piri wrote ‘Alexander’ he really meant ‘Claudius Ptolemy’.20 The argument for this truly outrageous act of second-guessing, and denigration of the intelligence and education of Piri Reis, goes something as follows: (1) Alexander the Great, a Macedonian, invaded Egypt and established the city of Alexandria; he was very famous; (2) after Alexander’s death his general Ptolemy Soter, also a Macedonian, also very famous, declared himself pharaoh and founded the Ptolemaic dynasty; (3) almost 400 years later the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (no relation to Ptolemy Soter, but famous too) compiled his Geography at the library of Alexandria; (4) Piri Reis mixed up all the facts about these famous people and places in his own mind and churned out the hilariously incorrect conclusion that the book that had convinced Columbus of the existence of the New World had originally been written by Alexander the Great.21

  Rather than going through such convolutions, which ultimately just pour scorn on him, I fail to understand what is so terribly wrong with taking Piri at face value. Why not simply credit him with enough learning and intelligence to have known the difference between Alexander and Ptolemy? Why not explore the possibility that Columbus really could – exactly as Piri says – have been motivated to attempt his Atlantic crossing after having seen a very old book, a survival from the time of Alexander the Great, in which the western shores of the Atlantic were shown?

  The questions are purely rhetorical and there is one answer for all of them. Scholars cannot take Piri Reis at face value on the subject of the book of Columbus because this would mean accepting the possible existence not just of a pre-Columbian map of the Americas (itself a historical heresy of the highest order), but of a pre-Ptolemaic map of the Americas dating back at least to the time of Alexander the Great – i.e. to the fourth century BC.

  The maps of Marinus of Tyre were pre-Ptolemaic and have not come down to us. Thus we do not know and can only speculate about their true antiquity, their origins, their contents, and about what they showed and did not show before the ‘improvements’ and ‘corrections’ that Ptolemy implemented. But if A. E. Nordenskiold is right to suggest a genetic link between the lost corpus of Marinus and the remarkably advanced portolan charts that began to appear from the late thirteenth century onwards then, in a sense, anything is possible.

  We have seen that these portolans contain strange echoes of the Ice Age world – suggesting that some of the source maps on which they were based may have been drawn thousands of years ago, before the post-glacial sea-level rise. If that is the case, then why shouldn’t the as yet unidentified prehistoric culture or cultures that made these maps have ‘discovered’ and charted the Americas as well?

  The survival of such maps, or copies of copies of copies of them, among mariners in the Mediterranean and along the Atlantic seaboard of Europe since time immemorial would explain the ancient yearning to discover an ‘immense land’ in the west. It would explain the ancient certainty that such a land was there. And it would explain why, down the generations, hard-headed seafarers and adventurers were again and again prepared to mount hazardous expeditions to try to find the great continent and islands that the maps told them lay out in the Atlantic.

  So what about the most famous Atlantic island of all? What about Atlantis?

  The Atlantis-Antilia mystery

  Plato’s story of Atlantis, though it contains no diagrams, nevertheless summons up an accurate mental picture of the Atlantic Ocean – bounded to the east by Europe and Africa and bounded to the west by the vast enclosing arc of the ‘opposite continent’.

  In the midst of the Atlantic Plat
o then presents us with another geographical image, this time supported by quite specific chronological data. The image is of the great island of Atlantis, no longer extant, that was swallowed up by the sea 9000 years before the time of the Greek lawmaker Solon. This suggests a date of around 9600 BC for the submergence of Atlantis – a date that falls in the midst of the cataclysmic meltdown of the last Ice Age.

  We’ve seen that the topographical ghosts of other inundated Ice Age islands, like Hy-Brasil and the unnamed island off the southern tip of India portrayed on the Cantino and Reinal maps, mysteriously begin to appear on portolan charts and world maps from the fourteenth century onwards. If Atlantis was also an island submerged by rising sea-levels at the end of the Ice Age, and not just a figment of Plato’s imagination as many suppose, then is it possible that its spectre too could haunt the portolans?

  A number of researchers believe that they have found the ghost of Atlantis manifesting as a large, roughly rectangular, ‘mythical’ island named Antilia that began to appear on portolan charts in the first half of the fifteenth century. The earliest surviving example was drawn in Venice in 1424 and is attributed to the cartographer Zuane Pizzagano.22 It is not known what source maps he may have been working from. Together with a second large ‘mythical’ island -named Satanaze – that Pizzagano portrayed lying to the north, Antilia went on to enjoy a long and ubiquitous life in global cartography and was not finally exorcized from most charts and atlases until the eighteenth century.23 As was the case with Hy-Brasil (which in fact survived on one nautical chart until the middle of the nineteenth century)24 there was also at one time a firm belief amongst mariners in the physical existence of Antilia – firm enough at any rate to have inspired several voyages of discovery.25