Piri Reis map

The Piri Reis map is a world map compiled in 1513 by the Ottoman admiral and cartographer Piri Reis. Approximately one third of the map survives, housed in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. When rediscovered in 1929, the remaining fragment garnered international attention as it includes a partial copy of an otherwise lost map by Christopher Columbus.

The map is a portolan chart with compass roses and a windrose network for navigation, rather than lines of longitude and latitude. It contains extensive notes primarily in Ottoman Turkish. The northwestern coast combines features of Central America and Cuba into a single body of land. Scholars attribute the peculiar arrangement of the Caribbean to a now-lost map from Columbus that merged Cuba into the Asian mainland and Hispaniola with Marco Polo's description of Japan. This reflects Columbus's erroneous claim that he had found a route to Asia. The southern coast of the Atlantic Ocean is most likely a version of Terra Australis.

The map is visually distinct from European portolan charts, influenced by the Islamic miniature tradition. The map was unusual in the Islamic cartographic tradition for incorporating many non-Muslim sources. Historian Karen Pinto has described the positive portrayal of legendary creatures from the edge of the known world in the Americas as challenging the medieval Islamic idea of an impassible "Encircling Ocean" surrounding the Old World.

There are conflicting interpretations of the map. Scholarly debate exists over the specific sources used in the map's creation and the number of source maps.^[1] Many areas on the map have not been conclusively identified with real or mythical places.^[2] Some authors have noted visual similarities to parts of the Americas not officially discovered by 1513, but there is no textual or historical evidence that the map represents land south of present-day Cananéia.^[3] A disproven 20th-century hypothesis identified the southern landmass with an ice-free Antarctic coast.^[4]