Page 35 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

years and rediscovered in the fifteenth century.
26
Ptolemy was custodian of the library at Alexandria, which contained the
greatest manuscript collection of ancient times, and it was there that he
27
consulted the archaic source documents that enabled him to compile his
own map. Acceptance of the possibility that the original version of at
28
least one of the charts he referred to could have been made around
10,000 BC helps us to explain why he shows glaciers, characteristic of
that exact epoch, together with ‘lakes ... suggesting the shapes of
present-day lakes, and streams very much suggesting glacial streams ...
flowing from the glaciers into the lakes.’
29
It is probably unnecessary to add that no one on earth in Roman times,
when Ptolemy drew his map, had the slightest suspicion that ice ages
could once have existed in northern Europe. Nor did anyone in the
fifteenth century (when the map was rediscovered) possess such
knowledge. Indeed, it is impossible to see how the remnant glaciers and
other features shown on Ptolemy’s map could have been surveyed,
imagined or invented by any known civilization prior to our own.
The implications of this are obvious. So, too, are the implications of
another map, the ‘Portolano’ of Iehudi Ibn Ben Zara, drawn in the year
1487. This chart of Europe and North Africa may have been based on a
30
source even earlier than Ptolemy’s, for it seems to show glaciers much
farther south than Sweden (roughly on the same latitude as England in
fact) and to depict the Mediterranean, Adriatic and Aegean Seas as they
31
might have looked before the melting of the European ice-cap. Sea level
32
would, of course, have been significantly lower than it is today. It is
therefore interesting, in the case for instance of the Aegean section of the
map, to note that a great many more islands are shown than currently
exist. At first sight this seems odd. However, if ten or twelve thousand
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years have indeed elapsed since the era when Ibn Ben Zara’s source map
was made, the discrepancy can be simply explained: the missing islands

26 Ibid., p. 159.
27 See Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library, Hutchinson Radius, London, 1989
28 Maps, p. 159.
Ibid., p. 164.
29
30 Ibid., p. 171
31 Ibid., pp. 171-2.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., pp. 176-7.

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