Auction will be postponed to Sunday morning, January 22. Doors open at 9 AM. Auction starts at 10AM. Enjoy your snowday Saturday and we will see all of you safely Sunday.

Who are we? Where did we come from? Have we developed linearly from cave man to contemporary man, as we have been taught, each generation building on the next? Or are we part of vast millenial cycles, advanced civilizations rising and falling beneath tectonic plates, fire and brimstone, forcing us back into caves until our metaphorical rebirth. The circle repeating itself over and over, as cyclical as the Great Precessional Year itself.

Scholarship has yielded many clues holding us in fascination. Hieroglyphic tombs from Egypt, cuneiform tablets from Babylon, the Old Testament, Vedic Sanskrit, Homer, Herodotus, Orion, Stonehenge, Giza, Machu Picchu, Minoa, Atlantis, all tidbits, jigsaw pieces in a vast game of discovery. Perhaps we should add one more - maps. From these ancient sources much knowledge can be deciphered. This week we touch cartography, although not from antiquity, most certainly in a world more familiar to us.

Sixteenth century Admiral Piri Reis, in service to the Ottoman Turk Navy, is our portal to the millenial cycle theory. His world map, completed in 1531 at Constantinople, was technologically impossible for him to survey in his day. A chronometer, the one scientific instrument absolutely essential to measuring longitude, would not be invented for another 300 years. Yet, here is the Reis map. Africa and South America are both precisely positioned by latitude and longitude, their coastlines exactly charted down to tributaries and mountain ranges. And even more surprising, Antartica, buried in a mile of ice in the 16th century, appears as a land mass. Get ready for this - the land mass depicted matches the seismic survey of Antartica completed in the 1950s.

How can this be? Piri Reis is no plagiarizer. His notes remain on the margins of the map. He tells us his work is based on very ancient maps from unknown explorers. Most likely handed down through the ages by serendipity. Learned people who left their fingerprints in a most unusual spot, telling us very plainly they had the ability, the tools, and the knowledge to survey and chart our earth. Although nothing remains of their civilization, their achievements speak quite loudly.

Who are we indeed, and where on earth, so to speak, did we come from? We do not know for certain, but we do know where you will be going...this Saturday specifically. Doors open 8 AM. Auction starts 9 AM. See you then. PA AU 1265L