# The Piri Reis World Map of 1513 > Piri Reis (Haci Ahmed Muhiddin Piri) - 1513 (Muharrem 919 AH, 9 March - 7 April 1513) > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/piri-reis/piri-reis-map-topkapi/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-13 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Piri Reis (Haci Ahmed Muhiddin Piri) - **Date:** 1513 (Muharrem 919 AH, 9 March - 7 April 1513) - **Medium:** Ink and pigment in eight colors on gazelle-skin parchment - **Dimensions:** 87 cm long, 63 cm wide at the top edge, narrowing to 41 cm at the bottom; the surviving sheet is estimated at roughly one third of the original, which one modern reconstruction puts at about 140 x 165 cm complete - **Object type:** Map - **Period:** Ottoman, early sixteenth century, Age of Discovery - **Current location:** Topkapi Palace Museum Library, Istanbul (Sultan Ahmed III / Enderun Library, Third Courtyard) - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A fragment of a world map drawn at Gallipoli in the spring of 1513 by the Ottoman corsair-turned-admiral Piri Reis, on gazelle-skin parchment, showing the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa and the newly reported shores of the Americas. Piri Reis names his sources on the sheet itself: some twenty older charts and mappae mundi, Portuguese charts of Asia, an Arabic map of India, and, he says, a map made by Christopher Columbus. Presented to Sultan Selim I in Cairo in 1517, it then disappears from the historical record for four centuries.It resurfaced in the Topkapi Palace library in 1929, identified by the German theologian Gustav Adolf Deissmann and the orientalist Paul Kahle. Since the 1960s it has also carried a persistent pseudo-archaeological claim, that its southern coastline shows an ice-free Antarctica proving access to lost ancient survey data. Historians of cartography reject this: the disputed coastline reads as a distorted, bent extension of South America, a common convention on maps of the period, and the claim rests on methodology that a geologist reviewer has shown conflates subglacial rock beneath Antarctica's ice with a hypothetical ice-free surface.Roughly two thirds of the original sheet is lost, apparently to moisture damage before or shortly after it reached the palace library. What survives is extremely light-sensitive and is shown only rarely, most recently returned to a climate-controlled case at Topkapi in November 2021. It was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World International Register in 2016. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1513-1517** Piri Reis `[documented]` (origin) Drawn at Gallipoli in Muharrem 919 AH (9 March - 7 April 1513), per the map's own colophon, compiling material Piri Reis says was drawn from about twenty older mappae mundi, four Portuguese charts, an Arabic map of India, and a map attributed to Christopher Columbus. - **1517** Sultan Selim I `[documented]` (gift) Presented by Piri Reis to Selim I in Cairo during the campaign that completed the Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Egypt. - **1517-1924** Unknown, presumed within the Ottoman palace libraries `[unknown]` (gap) No document, inventory entry or reference records the map's location, custody or use for roughly four hundred years. It must have remained within the Topkapi Palace complex, since that is where it later surfaced, but no more specific custody is documented. - **1924-1929** Topkapi Palace Museum Library (state property, under reorganization) `[documented]` (rediscovery, stage one) Set aside as an unidentified parchment map during museum director Halil Edhem's project to consolidate the palace's scattered libraries. Not yet identified or dated at this stage, per Turkey's own 2016 account. - **1929-1933** Topkapi Palace Museum Library `[documented]` (identification and first publication) Identified and dated by Gustav Adolf Deissmann and Paul Kahle in 1929. Kahle published the first facsimile in 1931 and a detailed study in 1933; Eugen Oberhummer published independently in 1931; Yusuf Akcura publicized the find for the Turkish Historical Society in the Illustrated London News in 1932. - **1933-1965** Topkapi Palace Museum Library, Republic of Turkey `[documented]` (custody) Held as Turkish state property. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk took a personal interest and ordered facsimiles produced. - **1966-1988** Topkapi Palace Museum Library, Republic of Turkey `[documented]` (loan, overseas exhibition) Exhibited abroad on four occasions in this period, twice in the United States and twice in Europe, per the Topkapi Palace Museum's own director. Specific venues and dates are not given in the sources consulted for this record. - **2013** Topkapi Palace Museum Library, Republic of Turkey `[documented]` (exhibition) Displayed at Topkapi from 23 January to 11 February 2013 for the UNESCO-designated Piri Reis Year, marking the map's five hundredth anniversary, alongside the 1528 map, organized with the Bilkent Cultural Initiative. - **2016** Topkapi Palace Museum Library, Republic of Turkey `[documented]` (international register inscription) Inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World International Register. - **2021-11-19-present** Topkapi Palace Museum Library, Republic of Turkey `[documented]` (current display) Returned to public display in a climate-controlled case in the Sultan Ahmed III (Enderun) Library, Third Courtyard, Topkapi Palace. Not permanently displayed; exhibition periods are set by the museum's National Palaces Science Board because of the sheet's sensitivity to light. ## Open questions - What happened to the missing two thirds of the sheet, and when? Conservators attribute the loss to moisture, but no date or specific incident is documented. - Did the map Piri Reis attributes to Columbus actually exist as he describes it, or is his account, at one remove through his uncle's associate, itself unverifiable? No independent copy or record of it survives. - Where was the map, and in whose custody, between its presentation to Selim I in 1517 and its rediscovery in 1929? Four centuries are undocumented. - Did Selim I or any later sultan ever consult or make use of the map? No record of its reception or use after 1517 survives. - Which inventory number is correct: Revan Kosku no. 1633, as given in Turkey's own 2016 UNESCO nomination for this object, or H. 1824, as given in several secondary sources? Not resolved in the sources consulted. - Has any independent scientific technical report (pigment analysis, radiocarbon dating of the parchment, multispectral imaging) ever been published on the sheet? None was found in the sources consulted for this record. ## Sources - [1] Republic of Turkey, General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums, and the Turkish National Commission for UNESCO, nomination form for the International Memory of the World Register: 'Turkey - The Piri Reis World Map (1513) in the Topkapi Palace Museum Library', ID 2016-34. - [2] UNESCO, 'The Piri Reis World Map (1513)', Memory of the World register entry. - [3] Wikipedia, 'Piri Reis map'. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with Gregory McIntosh's monograph and the primary UNESCO nomination. - [4] Wikipedia, 'Piri Reis'. Tertiary source, used for the biography and execution; flagged for replacement with a scholarly Ottoman-naval-history monograph. - [5] Wikipedia, 'Second Piri Reis map (1528)'. Tertiary source, used only to distinguish the 1528 map from the object of this record. - [6] Wikipedia, 'Kitab-i Bahriye'. Tertiary source, used for the surviving-manuscript count and the Walters copy's date. - [7] Wikisource, 'Piri Reis' Map', translated inscriptions and colophon. - [8] Gregory C. McIntosh, with a foreword by Norman J. W. Thrower, The Piri Reis Map of 1513 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). - [9] Diego Cuoghi, summary and excerpts of Gregory McIntosh's analysis of the Columbus source and the Hapgood Antarctica claim. - [10] Paul F. Hoye and Paul Lunde, 'Piri Reis and the Hapgood Hypotheses', Aramco World, January-February 1980. - [11] Paul V. Heinrich, geological critique of Charles Hapgood's and Harold Ohlmeyer's Antarctica identification on the Piri Reis map, addressing the isostatic-rebound error. - [12] Marco Masseti and Cecilia Veracini, 'The zoomorphic representations of the Piri Reis map (1513)', Anthropozoologica 51(1) (2016), pp. 41-54. - [13] Hurriyet Daily News, 'Piri Reis' world map on display at Topkapi Palace'. - [14] Hurriyet Daily News, 'Topkapi Palace Museum features Piri Reis collection', quoting museum director Haluk Dursun on the 1966-1988 overseas loans. - [15] Daily Sabah, '500-year-old map by Piri Reis on display at Topkapi Palace', 24 January 2013. - [16] Daily Sabah, 'World map of Piri Reis back to display at Istanbul's Topkapi Palace', 19 November 2021. - [17] Wikimedia Commons, file description and metadata for File:Piri reis world map 01.jpg, sourced to Topkapi Palace Museum Library. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. 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