The Piri Reis map: facts and legends

Istanbul, 1929. In the library of Topkapi Palace, the German theologian Gustav Adolf Deissmann, who has been asked to look through its old manuscripts, unfolds a piece of parchment. On the gazelle skin there are colourful coastlines, islands, ships, pictures of strange animals and small, closely written notes in Ottoman Turkish. One of the notes says that the map was drawn in the Hijri year 919, that is, in 1513, in Gallipoli (Gelibolu). The mapmaker’s name is written there too: Piri Reis, nephew of Kemal Reis.

Ever since, this map has been a favourite of historians of science and mystery lovers alike. But the two groups see very different maps. One sees a unique document that shows how knowledge was gathered in the early 16th century. The other sees the trace of a lost civilisation from the Ice Age. In this article we separate the two.

A sailor from Gallipoli

Piri Reis was born around 1465–1470 and grew up in Gallipoli. As a young man he sailed with his uncle Kemal Reis on naval campaigns across the Mediterranean, getting to know its coasts, harbours and winds at first hand over many years. Later he held important posts in the Ottoman navy. His life ended bitterly: after a failed campaign in the Persian Gulf, he was executed in Cairo in 1553.

What made his name last was not his sword but his pen. He set down what he had seen as a sailor in words and maps, with the care of a scholar.

A compilation on gazelle skin

The map we have is a sheet of parchment about 90 × 63 cm, and it is the western part of a larger world map. On it you can see the coasts of Spain and West Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean islands and the eastern coast of South America. The rest of the map is lost. The eastern part is thought to have shown the Indian Ocean and Asia, but that is a guess.

What really makes the map valuable are the notes written on it. Piri Reis states plainly that he compiled it from about 20 sources. Among them are maps he attributed to the age of Alexander the Great, thought to come from the Ptolemaic tradition; an Arab map showing India; four recent Portuguese maps; and a map by Columbus showing the western lands.

This is what a researcher today would call a bibliography. Piri Reis brought together maps drawn at different scales and with different orientations, compared them with one another and tried to fit them onto a single skin. That is why some of the map’s coastlines slide, stretch or join up in unexpected ways. These are not a “mystery” but the natural fingerprints of the way the map was compiled.

Traces of Columbus’s lost map

None of the maps Christopher Columbus drew on his voyages to the Americas has survived. That is why Piri Reis’s note that he drew on a map by Columbus matters so much to historians: the map is one of the rare sources that may preserve traces of that lost document. The way the Caribbean appears on it has been studied as a reflection of Columbus’s ideas about the region.

Here we need to draw a distinction. What is documented is that Piri Reis wrote that he used a map by Columbus. Exactly which map it was, and how it reached Piri Reis, is not certain.

Another common claim is that this is “the first map to show America”. It isn’t. Juan de la Cosa’s map of 1500 and the Waldseemüller map of 1507, the first map to use the name “America”, are both older. The Piri Reis map is one of the oldest maps to show America, and that is impressive enough.

The Kitab-i Bahriye: a sailor’s handbook

Piri Reis’s second great work is the Kitab-i Bahriye (Book of the Sea). He completed its first version in 1521 and an expanded version in 1526. The book describes the coasts, harbours, anchorages, shallows and winds of the Mediterranean and the Aegean in hundreds of charts and descriptions. It is a practical guide that answers a sailor’s questions, such as “Which wind will take me into this bay?” or “Where are the rocks off this headland?”

A second map fragment, dated 1528, is also kept at Topkapi; it shows the North Atlantic and part of Central America.

A map without lines of latitude

The Piri Reis map belongs to the portolan tradition. Charts of this kind don’t have the grid of latitude and longitude we are used to today. Instead they have wind roses (compass roses) with rhumb lines radiating from them in every direction. A sailor finds a rhumb line parallel to the line between two ports and reads off which way to steer. In an enclosed sea like the Mediterranean, this method works very well.

On the open ocean, though, things get harder, because the Earth is a sphere. It is impossible to transfer a sphere onto a flat skin without distorting it. Leonhard Euler proved this in 1775, and in 1827 Carl Friedrich Gauss revealed the deeper reason behind it with his famous “remarkable theorem”. Every map projection gives up one thing in order to keep another. The projection Gerardus Mercator developed in 1569 preserves angles and turns compass courses into straight lines; in exchange, it makes regions near the poles look far too big. The Piri Reis map, by contrast, was not drawn according to any projection rule, but by putting source maps side by side.

The “ice-free Antarctica” legend

In 1966 the American writer Charles Hapgood argued, in his book Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, that the coast curving eastwards along the southern part of the map was the coast of Queen Maud Land in Antarctica, as it lies beneath the ice. If so, someone must have mapped that coast before the continent was covered in ice. Later popular books dressed the idea up with a “lost advanced civilisation” or “aliens”.

The claim sounds exciting, but it does not fit the evidence:

1. Antarctica was first sighted in 1820. In 1513 nobody knew that this continent existed.
2. The ice is very old. Antarctica began to freeze over about 34 million years ago, and East Antarctica, where Queen Maud Land lies, has been under ice for millions of years. Our own species, by contrast, has been around for about 300,000 years. No human being ever saw that coast free of ice.
3. The curve has simpler explanations. On compiled maps, it is common for a coastline to be bent to fit the page when the information runs out or the parchment does. Exactly which source this curve comes from is debated, but no explanation requires an ice-free Antarctica.
4. The map’s own note. A note written beside that region says that these lands are very hot and that large snakes are said to live there. Hardly a description of Antarctica.

Why is the legend so popular?

Mystery sells. “Knowledge from a lost civilisation” sounds more thrilling than “a sailor carefully comparing his sources”. And sometimes pride in a map breeds the urge to turn it into something it isn’t.

Yet what made Piri Reis great is there for everyone to see: he gathered the newest knowledge of his time, named his sources openly, and combined a sailor’s experience with a scholar’s care. There is no need to make this map show Antarctica in order to celebrate it.

When you test a claim, the questions to ask are simple. Does the map itself say this? Is there a source from the period? Does the claim fit what we know about history and geology? The number of times something is repeated is no proof that it is true.

Summary

• The Piri Reis map was drawn in Gallipoli in 1513 on gazelle-skin parchment and was noticed in Topkapi Palace in 1929.
• Piri Reis wrote that he compiled the map from about 20 sources; one of them was a map by Columbus that is now lost.
• The map belongs to the portolan tradition: instead of a grid of latitude and longitude, it has wind roses and rhumb lines.
• The claim that it “shows Antarctica free of ice” is a legend: the continent was first sighted in 1820 and has been under ice for millions of years.
• The map’s real value lies in its source notes and in what it shows about how knowledge was gathered in the early 16th century.