Maps

Portolano Maps

Accurate maps were circulating around Europe at the time of Columbus, showing continents and shorelines that would not be discovered in some cases for hundreds of years.

The maps were known as Portolans
fragmentary maps used by sailors going from one port to the next.
Most of these maps were of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Maps of other areas survived.
These included maps of the Americas and maps of the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans.


Alexander's World Map
Bauche Map
Old World Map
The original center of the Piri Reis map lay close to the ancient Egyptian city of Syene on the Nile.
Oronteus Finaeus world map (1531), gives correct longitudinal coordinates, shows the as yet undiscovered Antarctic continent rivers, valleys, and coastlines in their correct position under the glacial ice also the approximate location of the South Pole. The maps demonstrate a knowledge of the existence of coastlines of undiscovered continents that were mapped by a past civilization. It was at Syene that Eratosthenes, Alexandria's librarian, calculated the circumference of the Earth. These ancient voyagers traveled from pole to pole. Instruments of navigation accurately determining longitudes far superior to anything possessed by the peoples of ancient, medieval or modern times until the second half of the eighteenth century.
The maps were drawn using sophisticated projection, and equidistance projection that depicts the features of the earth from one point on it's surface. The point can center on any spot on the earth's globe. The maps showed areas of the world, China, North America, South America, ice-free portions of Antarctica, long before drawn by European explorers. Parts of the Amazon River were depicted accurately long before that region of South America had been fully explored. The maps were accurate except they depicted the earth as it would appear if it's crust lay in a different relationship to the earth's poles as it does now. The King James Version world map shows the Sahara, not as a desert, but as a fertile land of rivers, woods, and lakes, as it once was.


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