Replies

Aren’t there some Columbus era maps that show a shoreline for parts of Antarctica. These maps if they exist could be a lot older, or copies of much older items. Remember that so much was burned at the Alexandria Library, and in 400 BC a Greek explorer (Heroditus?) was told by Egyptian priests about things that were 9,000 years older.

Herodotus' (and Solon's) tour guides in Egypt were no more reliable than those of today. :^)

The maps usually referred to are the Piri Reis map (see the keyword) and the Orontius Finaeus map; both of them postdate Columbus. The former doesn't show Antarctica per se, the second one shows a very primitive version of the Earth's landmasses as a sort of projection (analogous to Mercator's), with a greatly exaggerated and distorted thing that apparently is based on what little was known about Antarctica.

Since humans have been crossing large bodies of water for a long time (the earliest known was about 800,000 years ago, to Flores Island), there was probably some knowledge of Antarctica, possibly even in ancient times.

Herodotus recounts the earliest known circumnavigation of Africa, and I suspect the reference to "shoals" in their extreme southern route probably means icebergs. Oddly enough, I've been deep off into Tristan de Cunha vids on YT for the past hour or so. :^)

Columbus went to Iceland during his information gathering phase; this led him to conclude that the generally accepted circumference of the Earth, which had been handed down from ancient times, was way off, and that the Icelandic knowledge of the lands which became known as the Americas was actually a folkloric memory of China.

And the Library of Alexandria was burned by the caliph in the 7th century; had it been burned by Caesar (and nowhere does Caesar claim to have burned it) there wouldn't have been a large, long project during the Roman/Byzantine era to copy the texts from the deteriorating papyrus onto parchment. The exciting prospect is, the parchment library was burned (by the caliph, in the 7th century) but the ruins of the papyrus original version may be waiting in an ancient rubbish pile, a la the Oxyrhynchus papyri.