In the early 20th century, a Turkish historian discovered a map made in 1513 by famed cartographer Piri Reis. The map was incredibly detailed and even featured a perfectly accurate depiction of Antarctica — a continent not discovered for another 300 years. Conspiracy Theories is on Instagram @theconspiracypod and TikTok @conspiracy.pod! Follow us to keep up with the show and get behind-the-scenes updates from Carter and the team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the significance of the Piri Reis Map?
On the morning of October 9th, 1929, a Turkish historian named Halil Edem entered Istanbul's Topkapi Palace. For over four centuries, mighty sultans ruled the vast Ottoman Empire from this very palace. With Edem's help, the Turkish government hoped to turn the palace into a grand museum. But before that could happen, someone had to sort through hundreds of years worth of documents.
His eyes danced across the faded yellow pages, but when he unfolded one roll of parchment, he stopped. He held in his hands a map. It was spectacular. The cartographer P. Re Rees had signed and dated it in 1513 CE. It depicted the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, North America, and South America. Intricately drawn ships sailed towards the New World.
Over the continents themselves, the cartographer had sketched rivers, mountain ranges, and icons of people and exotic animals. It took an extraordinary amount of detail and skill to create such a map, but what struck Etta most was how impossibly accurate the South American coastline was. Europeans had only discovered the continent itself 20 years earlier, in 1492.
Somehow, Piri had perfectly drawn a massive portion of the Earth that explorers had never been to before. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Stay with us.
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Chapter 2: Who was Piri Reis and what was his background?
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Born around 1465 in Gallipoli, a Turkish peninsula across the Aegean Sea from Greece, Piri Reis' real name was Haji Ahmed Muheddin Piri. The word Reis actually referred to a rank he acquired later in life as a captain in the Ottoman Navy. From a young age, Piri felt at home on the sea. At only 12 years old, he joined a crew of pirates led by his uncle Kamal.
For 14 years, Kamal attacked Christian trading ships in the Mediterranean Sea with Piri at his side. The Islamic Ottoman Empire was expanding, but it wanted to avoid open warfare with Italy, Spain, and Portugal. So it contracted captains like Kamal to work as privateers for the empire. Piri's uncle taught him how to pilot a ship and navigate using the stars.
Together they fought battles and plundered ships. They even rescued Jews and Muslims fleeing Catholic persecution in the Spanish peninsula. And in 1495, the Empire officially inducted Piri and Kamal into the Imperial Ottoman Navy. Kamal died in 1510, leaving 45-year-old Piri without his captain and mentor.
Freed from obligation, he hung up his pirate boots and turned to his true passion, cartography. He returned to Gallipoli and began work on a map that he hoped would capture the whole world on a single page. This daunting task took three years to complete. Piri gathered more than 200 different charts created over the past 2,000 years.
One of his sources was an ancient map supposedly drawn during the reign of Alexander the Great, sometime between 336 and 323 BCE. Many others were drawn by Portuguese and Arabic explorers. To combine all these charts, Piri had to match the contours of each continent's coastline to the other, like fitting together pieces of a puzzle. Even with modern technology, this would be difficult.
But at the time, the task was nearly impossible. According to 20th century historian J.B. Harley, these documents all had to be decoded. A dotted line could mean a road on one map and a river on another. And even when Piri decoded the charts, he still had to deal with their inaccuracies. Back in Alexander's day, most navigators used a technique called dead reckoning.
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Chapter 3: How did Piri Reis create his map?
The Viceroy confiscated Piri's possessions and imprisoned him. A year later, in 1553, he had Piri beheaded. It was an ignoble end to a life filled with purpose, yet Piri's legacy survived through his atlas, and he was eventually recognized as one of the finest cartographers who ever lived. As for Piri's painstaking map, it faded into obscurity.
It languished in the archives of the Topkapi Palace until Halil Etem unearthed it in 1929. At first, Edom didn't quite know what to do with Piri's impossibly accurate portolan. He had his hands full trying to prepare the new museum. But realizing its significance, he showed the map to a scholar named Paul Kala.
Kala was an expert in the history of Islamic cultures and wrote extensively about Middle Eastern literature. When he saw Piri's name on the map, he knew how important it was. Kala was most excited by Piri's 20 sources, which had been recorded on the chart. The one Piri had used to draw the Caribbean was a map created by a so-called Genoese infidel named Kulunbu.
Kulunbu was the Turkish name for Christopher Columbus, one of the most famous explorers in history. It was Columbus who, in 1492, opened the door to European colonization by loudly declaring there was land on the other side of the Atlantic. Piri's map included a description of Columbus's journeys, as well as an explanation of how he'd managed to get the famous explorer's diagrams.
Supposedly, his uncle Kamal captured a Spaniard who'd sailed with Columbus and had stolen the map. In 1933, Kala published a paper revealing the Piriri's port-a-land to the world using the provocative title, A Lost Map of Columbus. It was well-received, and the map was soon copied and reproduced for study. The paper eventually caught the eye of Arlington Mallory, a former U.S. Navy captain.
In 1956, Mallory went on a radio show and announced a startling discovery. He'd scrutinized the Piri Reis map and noticed something strange about South America. The lower tip curved westward towards Africa, creating a massive landmass. Edem and Kala had thought this was simply an error. But Mallory noticed that the coastline looked just like Antarctica, which should have been impossible.
Antarctica wasn't discovered until 1820, 270 years after Piri Reis died. In 1929, a Turkish scholar discovered a remarkably accurate world map made by Piri Reis in 1513. More than 400 years after that, former U.S. Navy Captain Arlington Mallory declared that it showed the coast of Antarctica.
This revelation was significant because, according to official history at least, explorers hadn't discovered Antarctica until centuries after Piri Reis died. But myths about a southern continent dated back to ancient Greece. The philosopher Aristotle first posited the idea in the 4th century BCE.
He believed that the mass of land above Europe in the northern hemisphere had to be balanced by an equally large continent in the south. He called this place Terra Australis, meaning southern land. In the 2nd century CE, the Roman cartographer Claudius Ptolemy echoed Aristotle's theory and included Terra Australis on his charts. Over the next thousand years, other cartographers followed suit.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did ancient navigators face?
At first, this didn't make sense to them. Earth's equator is hotter than the poles because it is physically closer to the sun. Since Antarctica surrounds the South Pole, ice should have covered it for the entirety of its existence. Unless, of course, it moved. At the time, scientists were just starting to understand continental drift. Everyone had a different theory for how it happened.
Some thought each landmass glided like a sled over the bottom of the ocean. Others believe they were spread apart by expanding cracks on the seafloor. But today, geologists accept that the Earth's crust is broken up into chunks called tectonic plates. These float over the mantle and collide with each other, creating mountains and causing earthquakes.
For his part, Hapgood believed Antarctica was pushed southwards by centrifugal force. To give you an idea of what he meant, picture a merry-go-round. As the ride spins, you have to grip harder to not fall off the side. This is because the mass of the merry-go-round is accelerating inwards towards the center.
However, the rider is on the outside of the circle, so it feels like they're being pushed away. The same thing happens when the Earth rotates on its axis. Hapgood believed that thousands of years ago, centrifugal force caused the heavier continents on the surface to slide towards the equator. This effectively displaced Antarctica, which then migrated south.
When Antarctica moved to its current position, Hapgood believed it may have been warm enough to support human life. But he'd always been under the assumption that humans had been technologically incapable of getting to Antarctica until he heard about the Piri Reis map. Picking up where Mallory left off, Hapgood placed Piri's Antarctic outline over a modern globe.
He also found that the two charts mirrored each other remarkably well. Specific features like mountain ranges also seemed to match up perfectly. The only way that was possible, Hapgood wrote, was if one of Piri's sources had been to Antarctica when it was still warm.
In his 1966 book, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, Hapgood used geologic evidence to show that ice started covering Antarctica sometime around 8000 BCE, which meant that Piri's source had to be at least that old. This revelation flew in the face of everything historians knew about human civilization.
The oldest known Babylonian city maps were from 2300 BCE and amounted to little more than household blueprints. The oldest surviving world map was a clay tablet from around 600 BCE. As we mentioned, the compass wasn't used for navigation until the 11th century CE, and tools for finding longitude and latitude didn't even exist until long after Piri died.
Yet all of these would have been necessary to reach and accurately map Antarctica. So, Hapgood believed there must have been an ancient civilization with access to equivalent tools. A race of technologically advanced shipbuilders who explored Antarctica thousands of years before Christopher Columbus was even born.
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Chapter 5: What was the reaction to Piri Reis's map after it was discovered?
In his mind, this meant that either Atlantis developed aircraft thousands of years ago with extraterrestrial help, or they were aliens themselves. Of course, many scholars found the whole notion of aliens in Atlantis extremely far-fetched, and they felt that using Piri's map to justify it was ridiculous.
One of the most outspoken critics was Dr. Greg McIntosh, a historian and engineer who wrote a book in 2000 entirely about the Piri Reis map. McIntosh challenged the most fundamental assumptions about the chart made by Kala, Mallory, Hapgood, and the Flamaths. He began with its supposedly astonishing accuracy. Mackintosh confirmed that the northwestern coast of South America was fairly accurate.
To him, this made sense. Peary claimed to have used Portuguese charts as sources. By 1513, the Portuguese had fully explored that region, but Mackintosh noted that Peary's map was not nearly as accurate as some had claimed. For example, Piri drew a large river near modern-day Brazil, which Cala identified as the Amazon, but it was in the entirely wrong place.
Other features, like Venezuela's Gulf of Paria, were incorrect too. Some errors were even more blatant. In the Caribbean, Trinidad was missing, and the island of Hispaniola was rotated 90 degrees from its actual orientation. McIntosh compared the Piri Reis map with several other Portolans from the same period.
He found the exact same errors in those maps too, meaning they likely used the same Portuguese sources as Piri. And some discrepancies likely came from Piri himself. When Charles Hapgood examined Peary's sketch of South America, he was amazed that the cartographer had seemingly drawn the Andes mountain range, even though the European explorers hadn't discovered it in 1513.
But Hapgood failed to notice that Peary's mountains were thousands of miles away from the real Andes. McIntosh believed this was because Peary hadn't known about the Andes at all. The mountains on his map were made up. This was actually common practice in the Middle Ages. In lieu of actual information, mapmakers would make guesses about where mountains and rivers might be.
Piri even drew unicorns and headless beasts scattered throughout South America, so perhaps Hapgood should have taken that as an indication that the map's features weren't intended to be taken entirely at face value. But even with the mistakes in South America, Macintosh still had to address the question of Antarctica. There had to be a reason why Piri's coastline looked exactly like the real one.
As it turned out, the answer was simple. It didn't. When Macintosh compared the Piri Reis map to a recent chart of Antarctica, the overlay showed wild discrepancies. Features that should have been hundreds of miles apart were right next to each other. Bays and inlets on one map didn't match up with the other. In short, Mallory and Hapgood were simply wrong. Peary's chart did not show Antarctica.
And Piri's own words supported this. He had specifically referenced the Portuguese refusing to land in the area Hapgood claimed to be Antarctica. This indicated his source had been Portuguese sailors, not ancient Atlanteans. Which makes sense. Scientists have yet to find any evidence of an ancient civilization on Antarctica.
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Chapter 6: How did the Piri Reis Map relate to Antarctica?
95% of our oceans remain unmapped and unexplored. Perhaps in 500 years, humanity will look back at us and laugh at how little we actually knew about planet Earth. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you.
So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. or email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com. For more information on the Piri Reis map, amongst the many sources we used, we found the Piri Reis map of 1513 by Gregory McIntosh, extremely helpful to our research. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story.
And the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written by Xander Bernstein with writing assistance by Molly Quinlan and Connor Sampson, fact-checking by Kara Mackerlein, research by Bradley Klein, and sound designed by Spencer Howard. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor.
I'm your host, Carter Roy.