If we accept the generally agreed date of between AD 350 and 550 for the end of the -- at least semi-historical -- 'Third Sangam', then this gives us a fixed reference point on which to anchor the chr...
I will not delay the reader with lengthy quotations from the very many Taiwanese flood myths that were collected from amongst the indigenous population, primarily by Japanese scholars, in the nineteen...
The light-shaded Porcupine Bank can easily be seen directly west of Ireland, in exactly the same place, and roughly the same size, as the legendary Hy-Brasil on the portolan charts. The entire bank li...
Having a shared common source, or deriving from different but closely similar sources, provides a simple explanation for why the Cantino and Reinal maps are so much alike in almost all respects and al...
The suspicion that certain ancient authorities possessed good knowledge of the real shape of the Atlantic and its islands, and of the lands on both sides of it, must also arise from any objective read...
We know from Glenn Milne's inundation data that Gozo and Malta were indeed one big island during the Ice Age, down to approximately 13,500 years ago, and that they did not take on their present form a...
Traditions, with all their folksy redolences, are relatively safe matters for scholars to speculate about. Maps and nautical charts on the other hand -- especially accurate, sophisticated maps of the...
If we impose on a map of the earth a 'world grid' with Giza (not Greenwich) as its prime meridian, then hidden relationships become immediately apparent between sites that previously seemed to be on a...
1. Ceylon was believed by Marco Polo to have been one-third larger in the past than it had become by his day -- with extensive lands to the north of the present island said to have been 'submerged und...
On 16 January 2002 India's Minister of Science and Technology released the first results of carbon-dating of the artefacts from the flooded cities of the Gulf of Cambay. The results date the artifacts...
To have followed the speculative vision of Behaim in his famous globe, or of others like him, would have been disastrous, even though their work represents the cream of fifteenth-century mapmaking and...
It is clear that Bhu Mandala, as described in the , can be interpreted as a geocentric map of the solar system out ot Saturn. But an obvious and important question is: Did some real knowledge of plane...
The suspicion that European travellers in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century may from time to time have stumbled across charts and maps containing the remnants of a lost geography (perhaps even...
It is Professor Fuson's view that Chinese charts of Taiwan and Japan were the source of the 1424 portrayal of Antilia and Satanaze. He makes a very persuasive case that such charts are likely to have...
Only six books from the age of the Roadmakers were known to exist: The Odyssey; Brave New World; The Brothers Karamazov; The Collected Short Stories of Washington Irving; Eliot Klein’s book of puzzles...
In 1512, in handwritten notes on an enigmatic map that he had prepared showing the newly discovered Americas, the Turkish Admiral Piri Reis offered an intriguing answer to all these questions -- at an...
Even if we admit that running-survey and compass techniques somehow being used on ships to produce sea-charts as early as the thirteenth century (which most historians of science would rule out) we s...
If the normal portolano is indeed derived from the lost atlas of Marinus of Tyre, then it follows that other high-quality maps of regions much further afield than the Mediterranean and the Black Sea,...