Wow, 10th Century MS paint!
In pretty sure that's just Africa, with some water in between because they never crossed the deep desert and didn't realize it connects to the southern bit.
I think it's Africa too. It looks a whole lot more like Africa than North or South America.
Gonna be contrarian here and say that I see the North American resemblance. Arrow points at Greenland. St. Lawrence River has a small Hudson Bay above it.
Interesting to think about, but the scale of not only discovering but apparently circumnavigating it is where it becomes much more likely to not be NA.
The first humans to discover America was the fucking Indians.... There I solved it.
The indigenous never count. Tasman discovered Tasmania. Cook discovered Tahiti. The Vikings (or Columbus if you like) discovered America.
Although it doesn't work the other way around for some reason. The Thule, ancestors of the modern Inuit in Greenland, got there after the Vikings. But somehow they didn't discover it.
Al-Masudi was a very able cartographer, and his 10th Century map of the world is really impressive. And yes, it includes a continent to the West of the Old World.
Obviously this doesn't prove a genuine knowledge or discovery of the New World, but its a noted oddity.
The theory that a Muslim population discovered and settled in the Americas is widely discredited and shouldn't been taken seriously, but it is a published theory and supported by at least some academics. Most though dismiss is as either 'psuedo-history' or even 'propaganda', so yeah...
This theory might be ahistorical, but how sinister it is is debatable ("Yeagley believed that Shabbas and the other authors were simply trying to gain acceptance for Arabs, further integrating them into American culture by making them ‘native.’"). The American myth making around Colombus might be more based in fact, but lets be honest, there's a lot of fake history there too.
The word 'admiral' does come from the Arabic 'amir', - circuitously via medieval Latin and Old French.
So yeah the post is untrue, but I wouldn't call it 'insane' necessarily. Its a reasonably common, and interesting, myth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Masudi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_transoceanic_contact_theories https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/did-muslims-visit-america-before-columbus
Why is the continent described as "west of the Old World" when it's drawn exactly where the southern half of Africa actually is? I can't work out why he would think it's separated from the rest of Africa, but that definitely looks like Tanzania and Mozambique to me
It's pretty insane to look at that map in 2024, see that it looks in no way like the Americas, and say that's proof that Muslims had been there. Especially when that's apparently the only evidence.
Well, it was never going to look like the Americas even if it was true. The claim is that they discovered the land, not that they circumnavigated it or were able to chart the coasts with Renaissance-level precision.
There's no good or compelling evidence. But there's lots of 'evidence' that while dismissed by most academics, can be used in support of the theory in a vacuum, for example the existence of a pre-Colombian carving in Arabic (which isn't actually that, but was believed to be by some).
The idea isn't based on the map alone, it's only one piece of the corroborating 'evidence'.
Again, I'm not arguing that it's a true claim, just that it's not on the surface insane
I'm convinced.
No one questions that this is a computer drawn map?
I assume it's a trace, since someone else is saying that guy did draw such a map, but it's funny that the Facebook nut don't suggest it.
