He stuck his neck out about as far as a college professor could in the 1950s without risking his job, but Atlantis and prophecy were not respectable topics. Does this mean that certain prophecies might really be based on the calculations of ancient scientists who had technology and wisdom rivaling our own? Did they 'know' when certain things would happen in the future? Hapgood doesn't go that far. If Hapgood's thinking is correct (and as an author writing about related subjects, I believe it is) then we have information at our disposal which can help us make predictions about the next pole shift. He even speculates that the next pole shift may take the future North Pole to a new location near Lake Baikal in Siberia. He suggests that western Antarctica was habitable in ancient times. But he does clarify where several prior North Poles have been, including the last one in Hudson Bay. Hapgood won't tell us how quickly such an event could occur, nor will he claim that Atlantis was destroyed the last time it happened. This may destroy civilization when it happens. There are crustal displacements - pole shifts - in which the entire outer surface of the planet changes position relative to our poles of rotation and our equator.

Yet is was mapped in ancient times, free of ice, with mountains and river valleys in locations now verified with technology that can see under the ice cap.Īlong with an analysis of many other ancient maps (such as those from Oronteus Finaeus, Hadji Ahmed, and Buache) which apparently demonstrate cartographic use of spherical trigonometry around the world, these maps also show geographical details the cartographers should not have known in antiquity (at least as conventional history teaches us.) Hapgood also looks into a variety of additional scientific evidence and reaches a conclusion which was startling when he introduced the idea about 60 years ago: that the surface of the Earth is not firmly attached to the core. Hapgood analyzes this map in great detail but the one fact that makes it most noteworthy is the detailed depiction of western Antarctica centuries before anyone in modern times knew the continent existed. The Piri Reis map of 1513 is a fragment of a larger map of the world, based on source maps going back to ancient Alexandria and beyond. Hapgood's 'Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings' may be known mostly for publicizing the existence of what is commonly called the Piri Reis Map, but as the first word in the title suggests there are many ancient maps evidencing knowledge we once believed was discovered more recently.

Hapgood maps of the ancient sea kings