Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings - Charles Hapgood (book review)

Many books claim to be able to change people's lives or at least cause them to question what they know, or how they view the world around them. Charles Hapgood's 1966 release, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, never claimed to be such a book but in my opinion was one that should have caused a greater stir that it did. It normally goes hand in hand also, that most of these " life altering" works are written by people with a background that doesn't make them the most obvious of experts. Hapgood however had the best of credentials behind him when he formulated the theories found within this book. As a lecturer in History of Science for Keene State College and for the US military he could certainly be described as having the establishment on his side, so much so that his earlier work, the Earths Shifting Crust, a set of theories on plate-tectonic movements carried a forward by none other than Albert Einstein.


The geographer and geologist William Morris Davis once discussed "The Value of Outrageous Geological Hypothesis". The point being that such outlandish theories arouse interest, invite attack and thus serve as a useful ferment for the advancement of the geology. Once a theory that undermines current thinking is put forward it has an affect on all sectors of the field in question, in this case specifically Cartography. The conservative will be outraged and they will react to the book like bulls to red rags. The radicals will be attracted to the book will be drawn to its ideas like bees to honeysuckle and the liberals in between these two camps will feel at least a stimulating bafflement whilst the arguments race back and forth.

The starting point for the theories expressed within centres around the discovery of a set of maps in Constantinople in 1929. These maps were dated 1513 and named after an admiral called Piri Re'is. Articles were written at the time by Turkish and German scholars about these "lost maps of Columbus" but it was not until they were gifted to the US military that a modern team took a scientific look at what they contained. One of the most startling observations made about the maps was that they seemed to show a map of Antarctica's actual landform, something that, since it has been covered in ice for millennia, has only been achieved in the last few decades with sonar equipment. Was it possible to back up this amazing claim? At this point Hapgood and his students took over the examination of the maps and the findings are contained within this work.
According to Hapgood, the mapmakers responsible for the earliest maps must in some ways have been more technically advanced than sixteenth-century Europe and the ancient civilisations of Greece, Egypt and Babylonia. Not only did they produce fantastically detailed maps, they also appear to have to have mapped every continent. The Americas were mapped thousands of years before Columbus and Antarctica was mapped when its coasts were free of ice. From the evidence it seems that these people must have lived when the ice age had not yet ended in the Northern Hemisphere and when Alaska was still connected to Siberia by the Pleistocene, ice age "land bridge", that is, thousands of years before the heyday of the ancient Egyptians. This is quite a claim to make but the evidence contained with this work is very detailed and convincing.

The book is not the easiest to follow in that the flow of information is broken up by a fair amount of cartographical and mathematical information, but a little perseverance is well rewarded. The theory before you, if it is believed, is one that questions our whole understanding of the formation of the modern world. It hints at a longer development period for the rise of man, and even suggests that there is a whole age of early civilization that came and went with out leaving much of an entry in the history books, as we understand them today. The book is clever enough to stop short of making too many sweeping and radical statements about the rise of civilization; if it does it at all it does so by inference only. Hapgood limits his theory to the facts and lets us make our own minds as to what that actually means, but the conclusions that you will draw will be literally world shaking.

For any historians interested in cartography, cartographers interested in history or followers of the forbidden aspects of archaeology, this book will make you view the pre-historic world with new eyes. Prepare to be confronted with a historical bombshell also to walk away with more questions than you had before diving into its pages, but then it's a well-known fact that there are more questions than answers.