Navigation topic: Piri Reis Map again.........

Makes a convincing case that about 70 years before Columbus and about 100 before Magellan an enormous Chinese fleet circumnavigated the world. The Chinese introduced horses (before the Spanish reintroduced them) and chickens to South America. They also colonized both the east and west coasts of North America- there's a wrecked Chinese Junk in the Sacaramento River that carbon dates to the early 1400's, and early Spanish explorers of the California Coast recorded an encounter with an "unusal Indian tribe that appears to speak Chinese".

Like the Europeans, the Chinese had no real talent for determining longitude. In fact, the Chinese determined latitude by observing a cluster of stars surrounding the pole star.

The Chinese sailed to the Southern Hemisphere to locate stars that would allow them to determine latitude in that hemisphere as well. They were successful.

The map prepared by Turkish Admiral Piri Reis was copied from earlier sources. Much of the material archived by Chinese scholars contains drawings that match the outlines on Piri Reis pretty precisely. The author of "1421.." contends that if allowance is made for the Chinese inability to determine precise longitude the southern hemisphere and Pacific Ocean portions of Piri Reis are surprisingly accurate. The book speculates that the Chinese map was captured by the Turks when they took a ship commanded by an officer who had sailed with Columbus.

The second "compass rose" for the southern hemisphere on Piri Reis can be coordinated with the star systems the Chinese used to navigate when south of the equator.

Curious note: One of the major exports from America to China was pottery. Sounds silly with the Chinese reputation for porcelain and ceramics- but apparently some of the advanced cultures in Central America had devised a way to make much thinner pottery than the Chinese and it was highly prized.

Of course there are two schools of thought on the author's theory.

Here's the author's web site: http://www.1421.tv/

There is also an "anti-1421" web site, of course: http://www.kenspy.com/Menzies/index.html

I thought it was interesting that in comparing the Pro-1421 website and the "1421 Debunked!" site that the debunking site seems limited to addressing only a handful of the scores of items supposedly in evidence to support the Chinese navigation contention.

Have you read the book? It's very interesting.

The Chinese were pretty nifty sailors. Whether they did or didn't do what they said they did is subject to interpretation, but the devil is in the details and the details tell a very interesting story.

While a lot of the early Dynasty's maps don't exist, there is a written record of some of the earliest voyages and it's evident that 5th/6th Century Chinese sailors visited places like India, Siri Lanka and Madagascar. The written record shows details of shore and harbors that couldn't be made up.

So it's possible they very well could have visited places in the Pacific, including the West Coast of the Americas - when you are talking ships large enough to house and 1,000 people, anything is possible.

However the point is moot. The Vikings were there first.

Vikings? Don't be silly. We know who was first...... like, who built the pyramids?

Who were interstellar Vikings.

Nope. The interstellar Vikings were the Asgards.

But the Vikings were still there first.

~~ mutter ~~

That's where the whole American Indians being the 13th Tribe of Isreal thing came about.

Also, Navajo, if I remember correctly, is supposed to match Tartar closely.

I'm not a linguistics expert, but I have some questions about the Chinese Tartar claims.

1 - There are seven different Apache languages and not all of them "match".

A - A lot of the evidence of this closeness of language is acnecdotal and not direct.

2 - Chinese Tartars live almost exclusively in Northwestern China and it would seem unlikely that they would even be on a ship at sea serving as seamen as they are largely horse nomads with a very sparse population.

A - There are a ton of different types of "Tartar" groupings, but mostly it related to Eastern Europe which would also make it seem unlikely.

3 - The Apache language is closely related to the Athabaskan language family of languages which has no relation to the language of the Tartars.

So, where does that leave us.