Piri Reis lived to be 90 in the 16th century???

Anyone who has spent much time talking about Atlantis theories on this forum has probably heard of Piri Reis. If you haven't I'll fill you in.

Piri Reis was an Admiral in the navy of the Ottoman Turks. 21 years Columbus discovered America, he created a book which included a map of the world showing the coast of South America, Africa, and what -might- be Antarctica. The map is controversial and not entirely accurate, however it depicts certain things which shouldn't have been on a map from 1513, so it is a great curiousity to say the least.

While reading about this a few days ago, I stumbled across another aspect of this story that raised questions for me. Piri Reis allegedly lived to be 90 years old in a time when most people died in their mid-30s!
Not only was he alive at age 90, but he was commanding the Turkish navy in battle! He was beheaded by his sultan after losing a battle to the Portugese in the Red Sea.
en.wikipedia.org...

My first question to anyone who may know is simply how incredible is this? Did anyone else from that time period live so long? I hate to jump to conclusions, but when I first read this, my knee-jerk reaction was that this gives great credence to the idea that Piri Reis had discovered some kind of lost knowledge.

Not very incredible, though unusual. The ones living to that age were generally nobles and the well-educated. Nuns also lived long lives as well.

There's documented and verifiable cases of people living that long throughout history. Heck, Pharoah Ramses lived to be 80.

Well thats a load off my mind.
Speaking of Piri Reis the link in Wikipedia caught my eye and I checked a few of them out. Amazing how much you can learn if you have a long attention span.
With any luck at all, i'll post a very sound debunking of the Piri Reis map tomorrow after work. Long story short, it's been suggested that "antarctica" on the map looks remarkably like the missing 900 miles of South American coast on that map. The cartographer ran out of room and just bent the coast of South America instead of wasting his parchment.
If the coastlines match up when I check it out, and if I can put together a few more details to back that up, I think we can get this out of the forum for good. (it's a pretty safe bet actually- since i'm usually the one who brings the stupid thing up).

That's an interesting concept! It sort of makes more sense.

Did he leave behind any diaries?

He wrote a book related to the map if I understand correctly. The notes in the margins of the map itself shed quite a bit of light on the sources of the map- most of them come from lost portugese sailors.

I haven't been through everything yet but I have started the project as I promised. The southern land is an uncanny match for South America. The Parana River is marked just above the end of the acknowledged portion of South America. In the southern land I was able to identify the Gulf of San Matias by its proximity to the Parana River and the very distinct peninsula at the lower end of the gulf. Below that I believe that the Gulf of San Jorge can be identified by the outward turn of the continent beneath that gulf. Although most of the Islands displayed off the coast of the southern land are probably multiple chartings of a single small island, there is a prominent group which is almost certainly the Falklands.

I consider the issue resolved and will post my picture with labels ASAP.

It is also relatively easy to find translations of the notes which are all over the margins of the maps. These are very interesting because they hint at the source of Piri Reis' information. Many of the names he gives for places are in bad transliterations of other languages- primarily Spanish and Italian. The result is that you can tell the nationality of the cartographers who provided the source maps.

It is also noteworthy that the island clearly labeled as Hispanola is turned on its side, 90 degrees. This could indicate that the northern section of the map is taken from Columbus. Columbus at the time maintained that he had found Asia. He had his crew swear that Cuba was part of the Asian mainland, which is why you don't see it in the Piri Reis map. He also charted Hispanola to reflect descriptions of Japan, which of course has a greater latitude than longitude.

Anyway I'm disorganized at the moment. I'll compile a coherent post with links and a labeled copy of the map as soon as I can manage, probably tomorrow.

Here is the labeled Piri Reis map I promised. If that doesn't work for some reason I have it posted here

I have labeled a few lines of latitude and a few terrain features, as well as some points that serve as evidence for the source maps Piri Reis used being from 1492 and afterwards.

What I have failed to label is the 3 disks from which those radial lines originate. note that they are on the equator and the tropics. I do not believe that these points are significant for a coordinate system, however it has been proposed that contrary to the Hapgood hypothesis and other theories, these are not a sophisticated coordinate system but a nearly meaningless array of lines which were common on old maps and used as aids in plotting a ships course.
Also note the obvious picture of an anaconda or other large snake down there on "antarctica". I believe this is fairly decent proof that it's South America.

Thanks, Vagabond!

I'm in the middle of a paper, but will bookmark this for later. Great image of the map!

www.sacred-texts.com...

This link contains supposed translations of the notes made on the map. I have not checked the site carefully so forgive me if there is anything strange on it.

Tomorrow I will check this link more carefully and map out the most interesting notes and their locations.

One thing I can tell you off the top of my head is that "antarctica" is noted as follows: The entire land is waste, it is full of large snakes and for this reason the portugese infidels would not land there. It was also very hot. (not a perfect quote- and the infidel thing is because Piri Reis was a Turk.

Just a thought on this thread:

If people in Africa were travelling to North and South America, people from Spain/Portuagal were travelling to Africa during the same period of time. A lot of the information that they speak of could easily be explained by that and talk? All they would have would be the river and Brazil as I am sure Spice was traded between Africa and South America during that period? I'll attempt to find the link - but they found boats in the Amazon from Africa which were built several hundred years ago.

Anyway, just my idea...

It wasn't unsual for people to be quite old, Eleanor of Aquitaine was about 80 when she died, 1124-1204. She also went to Spain from France on horseback, I think she was in her seventies at the time. Pretty vigorous for an old lady.

I also seem to recall that there were folks in my family tree who were like 102 when they died in the 1700's, though most died around age 50-70. I guess the thing back then was don't get sick, don't die in childbirth, live a healthy lifestyle, and live for a long time.

I am interested in ancient sailors, because I found out that my 11th great-grandfather captained one of the ships that circumnavigated the world in 1577-80, along with Sir Francis Drake.

I've heard though, that there are rumors that even Christopher Columbus had a map when he headed west. I don't think that there is reliable speculation who made the map. It could have been someone from North Africa or the Middle East, or a viking for all we know.

It wasn't unsual for people to be quite old, Eleanor of Aquitaine was about 80 when she died, 1124-1204. She also went to Spain from France on horseback, I think she was in her seventies at the time. Pretty vigorous for an old lady.

I also seem to recall that there were folks in my family tree who were like 102 when they died in the 1700's, though most died around age 50-70. I guess the thing back then was don't get sick, don't die in childbirth, live a healthy lifestyle, and live for a long time.

I am interested in ancient sailors, because I found out that my 11th great-grandfather captained one of the ships that circumnavigated the world in 1577-80, along with Sir Francis Drake.

I've heard though, that there are rumors that even Christopher Columbus had a map when he headed west. I don't think that there is reliable speculation who made the map. It could have been someone from North Africa or the Middle East, or a viking for all we know.

My first question to anyone who may know is simply how incredible is this? Did anyone else from that time period live so long? I hate to jump to conclusions, but when I first read this, my knee-jerk reaction was that this gives great credence to the idea that Piri Reis had discovered some kind of lost knowledge

It's very rare, but yeah, there are others. Living to 90 then was probably comparable to living to something like 105 now. Let me try to dig up a few names of people who lived a really long time in 16th century or before:

Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha)
age 80: 563-483 B.C (dates are approximate, scholars best guesses)

Michelangelo (the painter, not the ninja turtle :p )
age 88: 1475-1564 AD

Donatello (sculptor, not ninja turtle again :p )
age 80: 1386-1466 AD

Hmm, that was in about 15-20 min of google searching. I thought I'd find more, but at least it should show that people could live to similar ages, however unlikely, most particularly Michelangelo's 88 years is close to Piri Reis' 90 years.

Yes those people lived -close- to Piri Reis.
However... were they hardened sailors, had been for their entire life?

Not to mention.. Piri Reis only died because he was beheaded after losing a battle against the Portuguese navy. If he was able to participate in a battle, even only giving orders, at the age of 90, I think chances are good he could live a decent deal longer.

concerning his age, weren't the Turks and other "Middle Eastern" peoples longer lived than Europeans at the time? i'm not sure about this but i think it's true.

Supposedly the admiral wrote the map using information from copies of books that were in the library of Alexandra. Can anyone support this?

And on the age thing, the person was most probably a rich noble man. That usually means a better diet and better living conditions and being a sailor, he's out on open water many times, helping out with the ship. That may explain his long life span, but 90 years is amazing I'll tell you that.

Originally posted by SilverDeath
Supposedly the admiral wrote the map using information from copies of books that were in the library of Alexandra. Can anyone support this?

The Library of Alexandria burned long before the Admiral's time. The maps he used were in the Library of Constantinople, although it is concievable that some of them may have once been in the library of Alexandria.

The big problem is that the notes in the margins of the map heavily suggest that they are of portugese origin, and some of the errors are distinctly Columbian. (Keep in mind that this map was published in 1513- it didn't exist as a whole at the time that Columbus sailed in 1492.)

I'm not all against the idea that Columbus knew what he was doing. He wasn't really betting against the flat earth theory- that was long debunked. He claimed to believe that the earth was something like 1/3 of its true circumference, and therefore that the ocean between Europe and the Indiies was traversable. He was "wrong". Of course he just happened to stipulate that he should be made viceroy over any new lands discovered (which is why he had is crew swear that Cuba was part of the mainland- because it would give him claim to the entire mainland- which he could not find).

Odds are that columbus was chasing down the leads provided by lost sailors. In Columbus' time it was becoming increasingly common for sailors lost at sea to be carried across the Atlantic, presumably owing to the increasing survivability of their ships which was allowing lost sailors to make their way home with stories of what they had seen. Look at all of the islands on the map which don't really exist- they are multiple plottings of real islands, each sightly off because they come from the best guesses of lost sailors, as described in the margins. If there was a map in Columbus' possession, it probably consisted mainly of those phantom islands, and he simply reasoned that there must have been a mainland.

Of course I don't have all the dope on Columbus- so he might have had other sources- for example I seem to recall that the Vatican had some knowledge of the Vinland colony (and that their description of its size was three times greater than what is historically accepted) but I'm not sure about that. Besides, if the info came from the Vatican, why wouldn't Italy have sponsored Columbus?

Any thoughts, perhaps from someone who has the energy to check into what might have been known from the Vikings at that time?

Columbus's error concerning the Earth's circumference came originally from Ptolemy, I believe, who had published quite a bit of geographic nonsense which was considered to be absolutely true in the day. To contradict Ptolemy was the equivelant of challenging their entire science, therefore it's natural that Columbus would have thought the shores of Asia to be directly across the ocean from Europe.