of my previous book, The Sign and the Seal. Like a guardian angel he
volunteered to devote a hefty chunk of his spare time to helping me out
in the US with research, contacts and the collection of documentary
resources of relevance to Fingerprints of the Gods. He did a brilliant job,
always sending me the right books just when I needed them and finding
references that I didn’t even know existed. He was also an accurate
weather-vane on the quality of my work, whose judgement I quickly
learned to trust and respect. Last but not least, when Santha and I went
to Arizona, to the Hopi Nation, it was Ed who came with us and who
opened the way.
Ed’s initial letter was part of an overwhelming deluge of mail that I
received from around the world after writing The Sign and the Seal. For a
while I tried to answer all the letters individually. Eventually, however, I
got swamped with the new work on Fingerprints and had to stop
replying. I feel bad about this, and would like to take this opportunity to
thank everybody who wrote to me and to whom I did not write back. I’m
intending to be more systematic in the future because I enormously value
this correspondence and appreciate the high-quality information that it
frequently turns out to contain ...
Other researchers who have helped me on Fingerprints of the Gods have
been Martin Slavin, David Mestecky and Jonathan Derrick. In addition I
would like to thank my Anglophone editors on both sides of the Atlantic,
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Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Tom Weldon at Heinemann, Jim Wade at Crown and John Pearce at
Doubleday Canada, as well as my literary agents Bill Hamilton and Sara
Fisher, for their continuing commitment, solidarity and wise counsel.
My warmest appreciation also to those co-researchers and colleagues
who have become my friends during the course of this investigation:
Robert Bauval in Britain (with whom I shall be co-authoring two future
books on related subjects), Colin Wilson, John Anthony West and Lew
Jenkins in the United States, Rand and Rose Flem-Ath and Paul William
Roberts in Canada.
Finally I want to pay tribute to Ignatius Donnelly, Arthur Posnansky, R.A.
Schwaller de Lubicz, Charles Hapgood and Giorgio de Santillana—
investigators who saw that something was badly wrong with the history
of mankind, who had the courage to speak out against intellectual
adversity, and who pioneered the momentous paradigm shift that is now
irrevocably under way.
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Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Part I
Introduction
The Mystery of the Maps
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Chapter 1
A Map of Hidden Places
8 RECONNAISSANCE TECHNICAL SQUADRON (SAC)
UNITED STATES AIRFORCE
Westover Airforce Base
Massachusetts
6 July 1960
SUBJECT: Admiral Piri Reis World Map
To: Professor Charles H. Hapgood,
Keene College,
Keene, New Hampshire.
Dear Professor Hapgood,
Your request for evaluation of certain unusual features of the Piri Reis World Map of
1513 by this organization has been reviewed.
The claim that the lower part of the map portrays the Princess Martha Coast of Queen
Maud Land Antarctica, and the Palmer Peninsula, is reasonable. We find this is the most
logical and in all probability the correct interpretation of the map.
The geographical detail shown in the lower part of the map agrees very remarkably
with the results of the seismic profile made across the top of the ice-cap by the SwedishBritish Antarctic Expedition of 1949.
This indicates the coastline had been mapped before it was covered by the ice-cap.
The ice-cap in this region is now about a mile thick.
We have no idea how the data on this map can be reconciled with the supposed state
of geographical knowledge in 1513.
HAROLD Z. OHLMEYER
Lt Colonel, USAF
Commander
Despite the deadpan language, Ohlmeyer’s letter1 is a bombshell. If
Queen Maud Land was mapped before it was covered by ice, the original
cartography must have been done an extraordinarily long time ago.
How long ago exactly?
Conventional wisdom has it that the Antarctic ice-cap, in its present
extent and form, is millions of years old. On closer examination, this
notion turns out to be seriously flawed—so seriously that we need not
assume the map drawn by Admiral Piri Reis depicts Queen Maud Land as
1 Letter reproduced in Charles H. Hapgood FRGS, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Chilton
Books, Philadelphia and New York, 1966, p. 243.
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it looked millions of years in the past. The best recent evidence suggests
that Queen Maud Land, and the neighbouring regions shown on the map,
passed through a long ice-free period which may not have come
completely to an end until about six thousand years ago.2 This evidence,
which we shall touch upon again in the next chapter, liberates us from
the burdensome task of explaining who (or what) had the technology to
undertake an accurate geographical survey of Antarctica in, say, two
million BC, long before our own species came into existence. By the same
token, since map-making is a complex and civilized activity, it compels us
to explain how such a task could have been accomplished even six
thousand years ago, well before the development of the first true
civilizations recognized by historians.
Ancient sources
In attempting that explanation it is worth reminding ourselves of the
basic historical and geological facts:
1 The Piri Reis Map, which is a genuine document, not a hoax of any
kind, was made at Constantinople in AD 1513.3
2 It focuses on the western coast of Africa, the eastern coast of South
America and the northern coast of Antarctica.
3 Piri Reis could not have acquired his information on this latter region
from contemporary explorers because Antarctica remained
undiscovered until AD 1818,4 more than 300 years after he drew the
map.
4 The ice-free coast of Queen Maud Land shown in the map is a colossal
puzzle because the geological evidence confirms that the latest date it
could have been surveyed and charted in an ice-free condition is 4000
BC.5
5 It is not possible to pinpoint the earliest date that such a task could
have been accomplished, but it seems that the Queen Maud Land
littoral may have remained in a stable, unglaciated condition for at
least 9000 years before the spreading ice-cap swallowed it entirely.6
2 Ibid., pp. 93-98, 235. The period lasted from about 13000 BC to 4000 BC according, for
example, to the findings of Dr Jack Hough of Illinois University, supported by experts at
the Carnegie Institution, Washington DC. John G. Weiphaupt, a University of Colorado
specialist in seismology and gravity and planetary geology, is another who supports the
view of a relatively late ice-free period in at least parts of Antarctica.
Together with a
number of other geologists, he places that period in a narrower band than Hough et
al.—from 7000 BC to 4000 BC.
3 Ibid., preface, pp. 1, 209-211.
4 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, I:440.
5 Maps of The Ancient Sea Kings, p. 235.
6 Ibid.
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Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
6 There is no civilization known to history that had the capacity or need
to survey that coastline in the relevant period: between 13,000 BC and
4000 BC.7
In other words, the true enigma of this 1513 map is not so much its
inclusion of a continent not discovered until 1818 but its portrayal of part
of the coastline of that continent under ice-free conditions which came to
an end 6000 years ago and have not since recurred.
How can this be explained? Piri Reis obligingly gives us the answer in a
series of notes written in his own hand on the map itself. He tells us that
he was not responsible for the original surveying and cartography. On the
contrary, he admits that his role was merely that of compiler and copyist
and that the map was derived from a large number of source maps.8
Some of these had been drawn by contemporary or near-contemporary
explorers (including Christopher Columbus), who had by then reached
South America and the Caribbean, but others were documents dating
back to the fourth century BC or earlier.9
Piri Reis did not venture any suggestion as to the identity of the
cartographers who had produced the earlier maps. In 1963, however,
Professor Hapgood proposed a novel and thought-provoking solution to
the problem. He argued that some of the source maps the admiral had
made use of, in particular those said to date back to the fourth century
BC, had themselves been based on even older sources, which in turn had
been based on sources originating in the furthest antiquity. There was, he
asserted, irrefutable evidence that the earth had been comprehensively
mapped before 4000 BC by a hitherto unknown and undiscovered
civilization which had achieved a high level of technological
advancement:10
It appears [he concluded] that accurate information has been passed down from
people to people. It appears that the charts must have originated with a people
unknown and they were passed on, perhaps by the Minoans 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 [Egypt] and that compilations of them were made by the
geographers who worked there.11
7 Historians recognize no ‘civilizations’ as such prior to 4000 BC.
8 Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, pp. 220-4.
9 Ibid., p. 222.
10 Ibid., p. 193
11 Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (revised edition), Turnstone Books, London, 1979,
preface.
15
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Piri Reis map (original)
16
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Redrawing to show detail
17
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
The US Airforce map shows the probable projection
that governed the layout of the ancient Piri Reis map.
From Alexandria, according to Hapgood’s reconstruction, copies of these
compilations and of some of the original source maps were transferred to
other centres of learning—notably Constantinople. Finally, when
Constantinople was seized by the Venetians during the Fourth Crusade in
1204, the maps began to find their way into the hands of European
sailors and adventurers:
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 Oceans. It becomes clear that the ancient voyagers travelled from
pole to pole. Unbelievable as it may appear, the evidence nevertheless indicates
that some ancient people explored Antarctica when its coasts were free of ice. It is
clear, too, that they had an instrument of navigation for accurately determining
longitudes that was far superior to anything possessed by the peoples of ancient,
medieval or modern times until the second half of the eighteenth century.
This evidence of a lost technology will support and give credence to many of the
other hypotheses that have been brought forward of a lost civilization in remote
times. Scholars have been able to dismiss most of that evidence as mere myth, but
here we have evidence that cannot be dismissed. The evidence requires that all the
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other evidence that has been brought forward in the past should be re-examined
with an open mind.12
Despite a ringing endorsement from Albert Einstein (see below), and
despite the later admission of John Wright, president of the American
Geographical Society, that Hapgood had ‘posed hypotheses that cry aloud
for further testing’, no further scientific research has ever been
undertaken into these anomalous early maps. Moreover, far from being
applauded for making a serious new contribution to the debate about the
antiquity of human civilization, Hapgood until his death was coldshouldered by the majority of his professional peers, who couched their
discussion of his work in what has accurately been described as ‘thick
and unwarranted sarcasm, selecting trivia and factors not subject to
verification as the bases for condemnation, seeking in this way to avoid
the basic issues’.13
A man ahead of his time
The late Charles Hapgood taught the history of science at Keene College,
New Hampshire, USA. He wasn’t a geologist, or an ancient historian. It is
possible, however, that future generations will remember him as the man
whose work undermined the foundations of world history—and a large
chunk of world geology as well.
Albert Einstein was among the first to realize this when he took the
unprecedented step of contributing the foreword to a book Hapgood
wrote in 1953, some years before he began his investigation of the Piri
Reis Map:
I frequently receive communications from people who wish to consult me
concerning their unpublished ideas [Einstein observed]. It goes without saying that
these ideas are very seldom possessed of scientific validity. The very first
communication, however, that I received from Mr. Hapgood electrified me. His
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.14
The ‘idea’ expressed in Hapgood’s 1953 book is a global geological
theory which elegantly explains how and why large parts of Antarctica
could have remained ice-free until 4000 BC, together with many other
anomalies of earth science. In brief the argument is:
1 Antarctica was not always covered with ice and was at one time much
warmer than it is today.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., foreword. See also F. N. Earll, forewor
d to C. H. Hapgood, Path of the Pole,
Chilton Books, New York, 1970, p. viii.
14 From Einstein's foreword (written in 1953) to Charles H. Hapgood, Earth's Shifting
Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science, Pantheon Books, New York, 1958,
pp. 1-2.
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Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
2 It was warm because it was not physically located at the South Pole in
that period. Instead it was approximately 2000 miles farther north.
This ‘would have put it outside the Antarctic Circle in a temperate or
cold temperate climate’.15
3 The continent moved to its present position inside the Antarctic Circle
as a result of a mechanism known as ‘earth-crust displacement’. This
mechanism, in no sense to be confused with plate-tectonics or
‘continental drift’, is one whereby the lithosphere, the whole outer
crust of the earth, ‘may be displaced at times, moving over the soft
inner body, much as the skin of an orange, if it were loose, might shift
over the inner part of the orange all in one piece’.16
4 During the envisaged southwards movement of Antarctica brought
about by earth-crust displacement, the continent would gradually have
grown colder, an ice-cap forming and remorselessly expanding over
several thousands of years until it attained its present dimensions.’17
Further details of the evidence supporting these radical proposals are
set out in Part VIII of this book. Orthodox geologists, however, remain
reluctant to accept Hapgood’s theory (although none has succeeded in
proving it incorrect). It raises many questions.
Of these by far the most important is: what conceivable mechanism
would be able to exert sufficient thrust on the lithosphere to precipitate a
phenomenon of such magnitude as a crustal displacement?
We have no better guide than Einstein to summarize Hapgood’s
findings:
In a polar region there is continual deposition of ice, which is not symmetrically
distributed about the pole. The earth’s rotation acts on these unsymmetrically
deposited masses, and produces centrifugal momentum that is transmitted to the
rigid crust of the earth. The constantly increasing centrifugal momentum
produced in this way will, when it has reached a certain point, produce a
movement of the earth’s crust over the rest of the earth’s body ...”18
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