The controversy surrounding the Piri Reis map is not just about how the 16th century Turkish cartographer managed to draw an accurate map of the Antarctic region 300 years prior to its supposed discovery, but also on how the map shows the land mass and coastline of the Antarctic region before it was covered in...

Here is another Mention of the Antichthon Landmass, the Origin of Paradise.   The world view of the earliest Roman geographer Pomponius Mela, who, although of Spanish birth wrote a brief work that agrees with most of its views with the great Greek writers from Eratosthenes to Strabo. However, Mela departs from the traditional ancient...

World map by Cosmas Indicopleustes. The rectangular inhabited world is surrounded by an ocean. To the east, beyond the ocean, is paradise. Beyond the ocean at the top (south) is the uninhabited world.

A spectacular 1665 map of the world by the German Athanasius Kircher. This is most likely the first world map to depict the ocean currents. Shows the entire world in accordance with Kircher’s hydro-geographic theory that tides and currents are caused by water moving to and from a massive subterranean ocean. Kircher postulated that water...

Taprobana and Taprobane was the name by which the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka was known to the ancient Greeks. Reports of the island’s existence were known before the time of Alexander the Great as inferred from Pliny. The name was first reported to Europeans by the Greek geographer Megasthenes around 290 BC. Herodotus (444 BC) does not mention the island. The first Geography...

The Western Hemisphere According to Macrobius   Macrobius’s work is a commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio. It includes an important woodcut map of the world illustrating Cicero’s interesting theories. This diagrammatic map shows two distinct regions of the earth. The inhabited Afro-Eurasian continent was balanced by an unknown, and relatively equal, landmass (Temperata Antipodunobis...

Here we have an example from the medieval times where the first known mention of Europe on a map was registered.  Map dated to around the 600s.

Here we can see an example of an older map to showcase how Geography and Navigation were dealt with around 1600.