Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Hapgood Charles Hutchins
Title : Maps of the ancient sea kings Evidence of advanced civilization in the Ice Age
Year : 1966

Link download : Hapgood_Charles_Hutchins_-_Maps_of_the_ancient_sea_kings.zip

Preface. This book contains the story of the discovery of the first hard evidence that advanced peoples preceded all the peoples now known to history. In one field, ancient sea charts, it appears that accurate information has been passed down from people to people. 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 geographers who worked there. Before the catastrophe of the destruction of the great library many of the maps must have been transferred to other centers, chiefly, perhaps, to Constantinople, which remained a center of learning through the Middle Ages. We can only speculate that the maps may have been preserved there until the Fourth Crusade (1204 A.D.) when the Venetians captured the city. Some of the maps appear in the west in the century following this "wrong way" crusade (for the Venetian fleet was supposed to sail for the Holy Land!). Others do not appear until the early 16th Century. Most of these maps were of the Mediterranean 4nd 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 Antarctica 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 possessed by the peoples of ancient, medieval, or modern times until the second half of the 18th Century. This evidence of a lost technology will support and give credence to many other evidences that have been brought forward in the last century or more to support the hypothesis 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. This evidence requires that all the other evidence that has been brought forward in the past should be reexamined with an open mind. To the inevitable question, are these remarkable maps genuine, I can only reply that they have all been known for a long time, with one exception. The Piri Re'is Map of 1513 was only rediscovered in 1929, but its authenticity, as will be seen, is sufficiently established. To the further question, why didn't somebody else discover all this before, I can only reply that new discoveries usually seem self-evident, by hindsight. C. H. H.. ...