Was North America mapped in 1154

Originally posted by Shadow Herder

Interesting map. It appears that North and South America was mapped while it was flooded. Florida, Hudson Bay, the Great lakes are all submerged. Half of the continent is submerged. Neat thing is that if you were to flood the earth thats what north america would look like.

California is an island.

That is an interesting observation. Could this map have been a compilation of a number of ancient maps, some of them created eons apart? Could this explain why Panama is not under water, as it should have been? And would that island, off the North American coast, necessarily be California? Could it be the tops of the Rocky Mountains, with a flooded Great Basin to their east?

Stunning ignorance of large parts of geography, history, science AND a concerted effort to ignore even basic facts that the OP mentioned (such as the Chinese map is a copy from the 1700s and that the original has never been proven to exist).

1. Native Americans are not descended from Chinese but from an earlier wave of exploration, they crossed an ice bridge from Siberia/Artic.

2. Magnetic poles can flip but once every 100,000s or millions of years and they have NOT flipped in the last few thousand years (they do wander around and continue to do this to this day however).

3. There is no hard evidence Chinese ever sailed to the West Coast of the Americas

4. Originals of precious maps would NOT be destroyed if they were copied, what sense would that make?

5. What the hell is the poster talking about going on about GOG and MAGOG ?!?

6. Ancient cartographers routinely filled in bits roughly/randomly as by definition they did not have a clear image of the globe to work with, the farther away from the centre of their world the more random it would often appear.

According to Wiki The 1154 Book of Roger was a compilation of many different explorers observations.

To produce the work al-Idrisi interviewed experienced travelers individually and in groups on their knowledge of the world and compiled "only that part... on which there was complete agreement and seemed credible, excluding what was contradictory."

en.wikipedia.org...

Apparantly these were the most accurate maps of the period. Even though much of Asia was not described, the map accuracy of the middle east was not improved upon for the next 300 years. It very well could have been the western CIA World Factbook of its day.

I'm still not sure of why they oriented the Earth with North down? Either works depending on the perspective you observe the solar plane from. Maybe something to do with the importance of a body outside the solar system such as the northern star?