Piri Reis map

The Piri Reis map is a world map compiled in 1513 by the Ottoman admiral and cartographer Piri Reis. Approximately one third of the map survives, housed in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. After the empire's 1517 conquest of Egypt, Piri Reis presented the 1513 world map to Ottoman Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–1520). It is unknown how Selim used the map, if at all, as it vanished from history until its rediscovery centuries later. When rediscovered in 1929, the remaining fragment garnered international attention as it includes a partial copy of an otherwise lost map by Christopher Columbus.
The map is a portolan chart with compass roses and a windrose network for navigation, rather than lines of longitude and latitude. It contains extensive notes primarily in Ottoman Turkish. The depiction of South America is detailed and accurate for its time. The northwestern coast combines features of Central America and Cuba into a single body of land. Scholars attribute the peculiar arrangement of the Caribbean to a now-lost map from Columbus that merged Cuba into the Asian mainland and Hispaniola with Marco Polo's description of Japan. This reflects Columbus's erroneous claim that he had found a route to Asia. The southern coast of the Atlantic Ocean is most likely a version of Terra Australis.
The map is visually distinct from European portolan charts, influenced by the Islamic miniature tradition. It was unusual in the Islamic cartographic tradition for incorporating many non-Muslim sources. Historian Karen Pinto has described the positive portrayal of legendary creatures from the edge of the known world in the Americas as breaking away from the medieval Islamic idea of an impassable "Encircling Ocean" surrounding the Old World.
There are conflicting interpretations of the map. Scholarly debate exists over the specific sources used in the map's creation and the number of source maps. Many areas on the map have not been conclusively identified with real or mythical places. Some authors have noted visual similarities to parts of the Americas not officially discovered by 1513, but there is no textual or historical evidence that the map represents land south of present-day Cananéia. A disproven 20th-century hypothesis identified the southern landmass with an ice-free Antarctic coast.
Much of Piri Reis's biography is known only from his cartographic works, including his two world maps and the Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Maritime Matters) completed in 1521. He sailed with his uncle Kemal Reis as a Barbary pirate until Kemal Reis received an official position in the Ottoman Navy in 1495. In one naval battle, Piri Reis and his uncle captured a Spaniard who had participated in Columbus's voyages, and who likely possessed an early map of the Americas that Piri Reis would use as a source. When his uncle died in 1511, Piri Reis temporarily retired to Gallipoli and began composing his first world map. The finished manuscript was dated to the month of Muharram in the Islamic year 919 AH, equivalent to 1513 AD. Piri Reis returned to the navy and played a role in the 1517 conquest of Egypt. After the Ottoman victory, Piri Reis presented the 1513 world map to Ottoman Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–1520). It is unknown how Selim used the map, if at all, as it vanished from history until its rediscovery centuries later.
Scholars unearthed a fragment of the map in late 1929. During the conversion of the Topkapı Palace into a museum, the Director of National Museums Dr. Halil Edhem Eldem invited German theologian Gustav Adolf Deissmann to tour its library. Deissmann persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a project to preserve ancient manuscripts from the palace library. Halil Edhem gave Deissmann unprecedented access to the library's collection of non-Islamic items. Deissmann confirmed the collection to have been the vast private library of Mehmed II (r. 1444–1481) and—based on Mehmed II's interest in geography—asked Halil Edhem to search for potentially overlooked maps. Halil Edhem found a disregarded bundle of material containing an unusual parchment map. They showed the parchment to orientalist Paul E. Kahle, who identified it as a creation of Piri Reis citing a source map from Colombus's voyages to the Americas. Kahle, and later scholars analyzing the map, found evidence for an early origin in the voyages of Columbus. The discovery of a surviving piece of an otherwise lost map of Christopher Columbus received international media attention. Turkey's first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, took an interest in the map and initiated projects to publish facsimiles and conduct research.
Kept in the Topkapı Palace Museum, the map is the remaining western third of a world map drawn on gazelle-skin parchment approximately 87 cm × 63 cm. The surviving portion shows the Atlantic Ocean with the coasts of Europe, Africa, and South America. The map is a portolan chart with compass roses from which lines of bearing radiate. Designed for navigation by dead reckoning, portolan charts use a windrose network rather than a longitude and latitude grid. There are extensive notes within the map. Written with the Arabic alphabet, the inscriptions are in Ottoman Turkish except for the colophon. The colophon is written in Arabic using a different handwriting from the other inscriptions. It was likely handwritten by Piri Reis, rather than assigned to a calligrapher.
The remaining third of the map focuses on the Atlantic and the Americas. In the top left corner, the Caribbean is arranged unlike modern or contemporary maps. The large island oriented vertically is labeled Hispaniola, and the western coast includes elements of Cuba and Central America. Inscriptions on South America and the Southern Continent cite recent Portuguese voyages. The distance between Brazil and Africa is roughly correct, and the Atlantic islands are drawn consistent with European portolan charts.
Many places on the map have been identified as phantom islands or have not been identified conclusively. İle Verde (Green Island) north of Hispaniola could refer to many islands. The large island in the Atlantic, İzle de Vaka (Ox island), corresponds to no known real or fictional island. Both an Atlantic island and the mainland of the Americas are referred to as the legendary Antilia.
According to the map's legend, it was based on:
There is some scholarly debate over the various sources. In the modern sense, mappae mundi refer to medieval Christian schematic maps of the world. In the fifteenth century, the term was also literally used to describe world maps, and it is possible the source maps fit in that broader definition. The Jaferiyes are seen by scholars as a corruption of the Arabic Jughrafiya, most often taken to mean the Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy. Ptolemy's book was widely printed during the sixteenth century, accompanied by maps from Nicolaus Germanus and Maximus Planudes. The Jaferiyes may also refer to the largely symbolic world maps of medieval Islamic cartography. Descended from classical scholarship, these treatises sometimes used the loanword jughrafiya in their titles. The Arabic and the four Portuguese source maps have not been conclusively identified but have been associated with several notable maps of the period. Finally, there is debate on the total number of source documents. Some scholars interpret the "20 charts and mappae mundi" in the inscriptions as including the other maps, and others interpret them to mean a total of 30 or 34.
Compared to the Islamic cartography of the era, the map shows an atypical knowledge of foreign discoveries. During the Age of Discovery, European voyages expanded the known world and disrupted the traditional conception of an "inhabited quarter" of the world comparable to the Greek ecumene. The attitudes towards the Age of Discovery within the Ottoman Empire ranged from passive indifference to the outright rejection of foreign influence.
Piri Reis synthesizes traditional worldviews with discoveries by undermining their newness, using rhetorical strategies to reframe European discoveries as the rediscovery of ancient knowledge. He invokes Dhu al-Qarnayn—believed to be a reference to Alexander the Great from the Quran—in his inscriptions regarding Columbus. According to the Quran and Turkish literary tradition, Alexander traveled to every corner of the world, thereby defining its limits. A marginal inscription describes world maps as "charts drawn in the days of Alexander". Another inscription mentions that a "book fell into the hands" of Columbus describing lands "at the end of the Western Sea". In the 1526 version of Piri Reis' atlas, the Kitab-ı Bahriye, he explicitly credits European discoveries to lost works created during legendary voyages of Alexander.
Compared to earlier portolan charts, the map shows gradual improvement. Portuguese source maps would have been similar to surviving maps like the 1502 Cantino Planisphere. Compared to the planisphere and the earlier map of Juan de la Cosa (1500): the Atlantic Ocean is accurate, South America is highly detailed, and the Caribbean is strangely organized. As a part of the expanding cartography of the sixteenth century, the map was soon surpassed. Piri Reis's own 1528 map included a more detailed and accurate version of the New World. Despite recent claims of an anomalous level of accuracy, Gregory McIntosh, in comparing it to several other portolan-style maps of the era, found that:
Piri Reis's inclusion of many foreign accounts was atypical within the Ottoman Empire. After the conquest of Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II began a project of creating copies of traditional Islamic maps in the Book of Roads and Kingdoms tradition. Piri Reis adapted the elements of iconography from the traditional maps—which illustrated well-known routes, cities, and peoples—to the portolan portrayals of newly discovered coasts.
Piri Reis provides an unusual etymology of "Ocean" as coming from "Ovo Sano", or "sound egg". The accepted etymology comes from the world-encircling river, Oceanus. Historian Svat Soucek has described the egg etymology as naive. Historian Karen Pinto has proposed that the egg etymology is better understood in the context of traditional attitudes towards the deep seas in Islamic culture. Typical medieval world maps followed a standardized and schematic design, with a disc-shaped "inhabited quarter" of the world separated from Mount Qaf by an impassable Encircling Ocean. Pinto observed that Piri Reis had reconciled the discovery of new land beyond the sea with this existing model, by framing the Old World—ocean included—as a giant lake surrounded by the shores of the New World. The Ottoman miniatures that illuminate the map can be further interpreted in the context of new possibilities and the changing cultural landscape.
The Western fringe of the map is populated by a variety of strange monsters from medieval mappaemundi and bestiaries. Among the mountains in South America, a headless man is depicted interacting with a monkey. The headless men, known as Blemmyes, were portrayed in medieval maps and books as threatening. In Islamic culture, monkeys were considered ill omens. The caption states that despite the monsters' appearance, they "are harmless souls," which contrasts with previous depictions of both the headless men and the edge of the known world. Pinto characterized the map's monsters as, "a distinct break with earlier, and in fact, co-terminus manuscript traditions, which enforce and reinforce the notion that the Encircling Ocean is full of scary beasts and therefore should not be crossed." In addition to the Blemmye, several other creatures from Natural History by Pliny the Elder inhabit the Americas. The dog-faced man shown dancing with a monkey is one of the cynocephaly; a monoceros and yale are shown on the South American coast; and a bonnacon is shown on the Southern Continent. Other creatures likely originate in Arabic and Persian bestiaries. The multi-horned beast on the bottom edge of the map may represent the legendary shadhavar, said to emit music as wind blows through its hollow horns.
The Caribbean islands and the coastline in the Northwest corner of the map are widely believed to be based on a lost map drawn by Christopher Columbus, or under his supervision. The western coast on the map combines features of Central America and Cuba, reflecting Columbus's claim that Cuba was part of an Asian mainland. During the 1494 exploration of Cuba, Columbus was so adamant that he had found Asia, that he had a notary board each of his ships anchored off the coast. Columbus compelled his men to swear that Cuba was a part of Asia and agree to never contradict this interpretation "under a penalty of 10,000 maravedis and the cutting out of the tongue". The mainland in the extreme northwest is labeled with place-names from Columbus's voyages along the coasts of Cuba. For example, a stretch of coast is labelled Ornofay, as recorded by Columbus but depicted on no other maps.
Peculiar features of the Caribbean can be attributed to Columbus. Notably, a massive Hispaniola is oriented north to south. Columbus traveled West with a chart from Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli that—west of the Canary Islands—showed open ocean, mythical Antilia, and Cipangu (Marco Polo's Japan) between Europe and Asia. The general position and shape of Hispaniola are similar to contemporary maps of Cipangu. The absence of the island's distinctive Gulf of Gonâve is more evidence of a Columbian origin because he did not explore Hispaniola's western shore. According to Gregory McIntosh, the most clearly matching coastlines are around Cabo Falso in Pedernales. The island near Cabo Falso is labelled with a Turkish translation of Alto Velo Island, explored and named by Columbus on his second voyage in August 1494. The peninsulas protruding from Puerto Rico are not present in reality but are also depicted on the map of Juan de la Cosa, who sailed with Columbus. İle Bele near Puerto Rico is possibly Vieques, named Gratiosa, or Graceful, by Columbus.
There is disagreement on how much of the map draws from Columbus. Kahle and most later scholars attributed everything north and west of the phantom island Antilia to this source. Soucek expressed doubts about Kahle's claim, which included some of the South American coast. McIntosh found that Cuba, Central America, The Bahamas, and Hispaniola could be clearly attributed to an early map from Columbus, but not the Lesser Antilles, especially the Virgin Islands which are duplicated on the map.
The Southern Continent stretching across the Atlantic Ocean is most likely Terra Australis. Some authors have claimed that it depicts areas of South America not officially discovered in 1513, and a popular but disproven hypothesis alleges it to be Antarctica. Maps of the period generally depicted this theoretical southern continent, in various configurations. This land was posited by Roman geographer Ptolemy as a counterbalance to the extensive land areas in the known world.
As explorers charted the Southern Hemisphere, it pushed back the potential bounds of Terra Australis. Discoveries, like Tierra del Fuego and New Holland, were initially mapped as the northern edge of the unknown southern land. As these areas were mapped, Terra Australis shrank, grew vague, and became a fantastical locale invoked in literature, notably Gulliver's Travels and Gabriel de Foigny's La Terre Australe Connue. Belief in the Southern Continent was abandoned after the second voyage of James Cook in the 1770s showed that if it existed, it was much smaller than imagined previously. The first confirmed landing on Antarctica was only during the First Russian Antarctic Expedition in 1820, and the coastline of Queen Maud Land did not see significant exploration before Norwegian expeditions began in 1891.
The southernmost conclusively identified feature on the map is a stretch of Brazilian coastline including Cabo Frio (Kav Friyo on the map), possibly the earliest depiction of Rio de Janeiro, and likely the area around Cananéia, labeled Katino on the map. Information about this area is attributed to recent Portuguese voyages, and the southernmost point depicted on contemporary Portuguese maps was Cananéia as described by Amerigo Vespucci, at 25 degrees south. Beyond this point, the coast curves sharply east. Some modern writers have interpreted this coastline as the coast of South America, either drawn along the map's edge or distorted to push it East of the line of demarcation. Cartographic historian Svat Soucek noted that the parchment curves by South America, and that "it was not unusual for cartographers to adjust the orientation of a coastline to fit the surface available". Italian art historian and graphic designer Diego Cuoghi said that "Piri Reis often mentions Portuguese maps in his notes, and of course Portuguese would have preferred the coast south of Brazil to bend sharply to the right". This identification relies on perceived visual similarities between the map and modern maps of the Río de la Plata, San Matías Gulf, Valdés Peninsula, and Strait of Magellan's Atlantic opening. Aside from the subjective comparisons, there is no historical evidence that Piri Reis could have known of these places and no textual evidence in the map. In particular, the large snakes like those of the Boidae family mentioned on the map, are not found that far south in Patagonia.
The Antarctic claim originates with Captain Arlington H. Mallery, a civil engineer and amateur archaeologist who was a supporter of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact hypotheses. Mallery used a grid system to reposition the coordinates on the map and claimed the accuracy of these reconstructed maps to be comparable to modern maps. Mallery's ideas were exposed to a wider audience when Georgetown University broadcast a discussion between Mallery, director of the Weston Observatory Daniel Lineham, and director of the Georgetown University Observatory Francis Heyden in 1956. Inspired by Mallery, historian Charles Hapgood, in his 1966 book Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, proposed a theory of global exploration by a pre-classical undiscovered civilization based on his analysis of Renaissance and late-medieval maps. Hapgood's book was met with skepticism due to its lack of evidence and reliance on polar shift. Hapgood acknowledged that his theory disregarded the text and some of the placement of land masses on the map. For example, he designated an island to be one-half of Cuba—claiming it was "wrongly labeled Espaniola" or Hispaniola—and remarked that, "nothing could better illustrate how ignorant Piri Re'is was of his own map."
Hapgood, and his graduate students who aided with the research, were influential in spreading the idea that the Piri Reis map shows Antarctica as it looked during the Neolithic, without glacial ice. Two letters reproduced in Hapgood's book express optimism about this hypothesis based on the 1949 Norwegian-British-Swedish Seismic Survey of Queen Maud Land. According to geologist Paul Heinrich, this mistakenly conflates the topography of Antarctica below the ice with a hypothetical ice-free Antarctica. It does not take into account post-glacial rebound, where land rises after massive ice sheets melt away. Additionally, the 1949 survey could not measure even one percent of the area drawn in the Piri Reis map. Subsequent studies with access to more data have shown no significant similarities to Antartica's coast beneath the ice or a projected Antarctic coastline without ice.
Hapgood mistakenly believed that Antarctica had been free of ice in 17,000 BC and partially ice-free as late as 4,000 BC. This erroneous date range could have put the mapping of Antarctica contemporary with many known prehistoric societies. More recent ice core data shows that Antarctica was last free of ice over ten million years ago. Writers like Erich von Daniken, Donald Keyhoe, and Graham Hancock have uncritically repeated Hapgood's claims as proof of ancient astronauts, flying saucers, and a lost civilization comparable to Atlantis, respectively.
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Fringe theories: