The Piri Reis Map, shown below, is the oldest surviving map to show the Americas. It is not European, surprisingly, but Turkish. It bears a date of 919 in the Moslem calendar, corresponding to 1513 in the Western Calendar. It is in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, a fabulous museum and the locale for a truly awful movie in the late 1960’s. (I’ve been there - the real place bears no resemblance to the place in the movie.) The map was lost for a long time and only rediscovered in the 20th century.

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