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The book "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings" by Charles Hapgood was the main source for article author Rand Ath (formerly Rand Flem-Ath), who with his (ex-?) wife coauthored a book which claimed that Plato's Atlantis was in Antarctica. One useful piece of information from the book (I found it useful anyway) was that fossils of beech trees dating back a mere three million years were found in Antarctica -- yet the continent was supposed to have been under ice for thirty million years. That's one of the two bits of research (even I consider these authors "fringe", but I consider myself in that category, not a bad place to be) that put me onto something that will make it into my book, y'know, I'll finish it in the last months of my life, like Copernicus or Hiram Ulysses Grant.

Piri Reis attributed the source maps to ancient sources, some as old as Alexander the Great. While there is evidence of maps about that old (a map of the Roman Empire, including an Erythraean Sea map), anything specific he mentions no longer exists. This is unsurprising, and their failure to survive doesn't mean that they'd never existed.

Herodotus' account of the Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa (clockwise, starting at the Red Sea, under the auspices of the Pharaoh of Egypt) includes the curious detail of "shoals" that only existed in the far south, while approaching, rounding, and departing from what we now call the Cape of Good Hope. That could describe icebergs. Herodotus' work is useful in part because, usually, he repeats what he's heard even if he does so with a proviso that he didn't find it believable -- in this context, he mentions that the Phoenicians, as they headed west in order to turn north along the west coast of Africa, had the Sun on their right, which is exactly what they should have seen, knowing what we know now. Herodotus understood that the Indian Ocean and Atlantic were all part of the world ocean, but doesn't seem to have understood that the Earth is a globe, or at least doesn't seem to have thought about the ramifications of the idea.

Archival post about some of this.

Thanks fieldmarshaldj.

You don’t have to be south of the equator to have the sun on your right when sailing west—in the summer someone sailing went between the equator and the Tropic of Cancer (for example, between India and the Red Sea) would have the sun on his right.

So how was knowledge of an Antarctica warm enough for beech trees supposedly handed down from 3 million years ago to Plato? Australopithecines to Homo erectus to Homo neanderthalensis to Cro-Magnon Man to Proto-Indo-Europeans to Bronze Age Greeks to Iron Age Greeks to Archaic Greeks to Classical Greeks...and only Plato bothered to write anything about it?