Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings Quotes

“The evidence presented by the ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any of the known cultures, of a true civilization, of a comparatively advanced sort, which either was localized in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some respects, may well have been more advanced than the civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and Rome. In astronomy, nautical science, mapmaking and possibly ship-building, it was perhaps more advanced than any state of culture before the 18th Century of the Christian Era. It was in the 18th Century that we first developed a practical means of finding longitude. It was in the 18th Century that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Not until the 19th Century did we begin to send out ships for purposes of whaling or exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic Seas. The maps indicate that some ancient people may have done all these things.”
― Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age

“The idea of the simple linear development of society from the culture of the paleolithic (Old Stone Age) through the successive stages of the neolithic (New Stone Age), Bronze, and Iron Ages must be given up. Today we find primitive cultures co-existing with advanced modern society on all the continents-the Bushmen of Australia, the Bushmen of South Africa, truly primitive peoples in South America, and in New Guinea; some tribal peoples in the United States. We shall now assume that, some 20,000 or more years ago, while paleolithic peoples held out in Europe, more advanced cultures existed elsewhere on the earth, and that we have inherited a part of what they once possessed, passed down from people to people.”
― Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age

“The most important evidence for the age of the maps [...] is to be found in those showing the Antarctic, especially in the maps of Mercator, Piri Re'is, and Oronteus Finaeus. All of these maps appear to show the continent at a time when there was a temperate climate there. Some geological evidence, in the form of three sedimentary cores from the bottom of the Ross Sea, has been presented to suggest that such a warm period may indeed have existed there down to about 6,000 years ago.”
― Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age

“Most of these maps were of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. But maps of other areas survived. These included maps of the Americas and maps of the Arctic and Antarctic seas. It becomes clear that the ancient voyagers traveled from pole to pole. Unbelievable as it may appear, the evidence nevertheless indicates that some ancient people explored the coasts of Antatica when its coasts were free of ice. It is clear, too, that they had an instrument of navigation for accurately finding the longitudes of places that was far superior to anything posessed by the peoples of ancient, medieval, or modern times until the second half of the 18th Century.”
― Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age

“It appears that the charts must have originated with a people unknown; that they were passed on, perhaps by the Minoans (the Sea Kings of ancient Crete) and the Phoenicians, who were for a thousand years and more the greatest sailors of the ancient world. We have evidence that they were collected and studied in the great library of Alexandria and that compilations of them were made by the greographers who worked there.”
― Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age

“We do not know whether [Hipparchus] drew maps--perhaps he did--but the truth is that in his day he could not possibly have applied his projections to the globe because the necessary data, in the form of correct findings of latitudes and longitudes of a very large number of places over the known areas of the earth, were not available. This was the weakness of all Greek cartographic science. In Greek times mathematics was in advance of mechanical instrumentation: There was no instrument for easily and correctly determining the longitude of places. However, the Piri Re'is and the other maps we went on to study, seemed to suggest that such an instrument or instruments had once existed, and had been used by people who knew very closely the correct size of the earth. Moreover, it looks as if this people had visited most of the earth. They seem to have been quite well acquainted with the Americas, and to have mapped the coasts of Antarctica.”
― Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age

“[I]n most cases the errors on the Piri Re'is Map are due to mistakes in the compilation of the world map, presumably in Alexandrian times, since it appears, as we shall see, that Piri Re'is could not have put them together at all. The component maps, coming from a far greater antiquity, were far more accurate. The Piri Re'is Map appears, therefore, to be evidence of a decline of science from remote antiquity to classical times.”
― Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age

“The Greek geographers of Alexandria, when they prepared their world map using the circumference of Eratosthenes, had in front of them source maps that had been drawn without the Eratosthenian error, that is, apparently without any discernible error at all. We shall see further evidence of this, evidence suggesting that the people who originated the maps possessed a more advanced science than that of the Greeks.”
― Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age