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The USSR claimed to have invented absolutely everything. Soviet children were taught that everything from the locomotive to the airplane had been invented in Russia. Muslims can’t seem to stop jumping headlong into the same xenophobic delusional propaganda. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday hit back at ridicule of his claim that Islamic explorers discovered the Americas three centuries before Columbus, accusing his Muslim critics of lacking “self-confidence”.In an aggressive rebuttal of the criticism heaped in some quarters on his comments, Erdogan also suggested that the purported “discovery” of the Americas by Muslims should be taught in schools.“A big...

Some historians and political observers were surprised over the weekend when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, chief of America’s NATO ally, said Muslims discovered the Americas more than 300 years before Christopher Columbus. But the Islamic leader was doing nothing more than stating publicly what Islamic historians have said, including some who believe Native Americans who spoke Arabic greeted Muslim adventurers hundreds of years before the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria sailed. Among those reporting Erdogan’s statement was the BBC, which noted his AK Party “is rooted in political Islam.” Erdogan said, “Muslim sailors arrived in America in 1178,” but...

actual photo h/t Blazing Cat FurIn eleven hundred and seventy eight Muhammad sailed through the Hormuz strait.He had three ships that left from Persia; Heading out and sailing further Than anyone had sailed before To land upon America’s shore. MOTUS, 2014And that, my friends, is the legend of how Muslims discovered America, 300 years before Columbus. And that’s great news, just in time for Thanksgiving! It means Western Imperialism is off the hook for stealing and raping the Indians’ land, brutally killing Native Americans with long guns and small pox and introducing everything from racism, sexism, anti-gay bigotry, and the class...

ISTANBUL – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is claiming that Muslim sailors reached the Americas more than 300 years before explorer Christopher Columbus. Speaking Saturday at a gathering of Muslim leaders from Latin America, Erdogan said that contact between Islam and Latin America dates to the 12th century. "It is alleged that the American continent was discovered by Columbus in 1492," Erdogan said. "In fact, Muslim sailors reached the American continent 314 years before Columbus, in 1178."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that the Americas were discovered by Muslims in the 12th century, nearly three centuries before Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus claimed the discovery in the name of Spain. "Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus," the president said in a televised speech during an Istanbul summit of Muslim leaders from Latin America. "Muslim sailors arrived in America from 1178. Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast," Erdogan said. Erdogan said that Ankara was even...

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that the Americas were discovered by Muslims in the 12th century, nearly three centuries before Christopher Columbus set foot there. "Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus," the conservative president said in a televised speech during an Istanbul summit of Muslim leaders from Latin America. "Muslim sailors arrived in America from 1178. Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast," Erdogan said.

Francaviglia does not dispute that Muslims could have beaten Columbus to the New World. They certainly possessed the technological expertise to have done so; but, so far, there is no reliable evidence that they did. There are, however, very good reasons for thinking that they didn't. Arab maps were the best in the world, but none of the existing early maps demonstrates any knowledge of the Americas. Arabs also were prolific writers. Francaviglia thinks it’s virtually impossible that Arab explorers discovered the Americas and made no mention of the fact. Why then is the supposed pre-Columbian Muslim discovery of America...

For a guy who claimed to spend 17 years in China as a confidant of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo left a surprisingly skimpy paper trail. No Asian sources mention the footloose Italian. The only record of his 13th-century odyssey through the Far East is the hot air of his own Travels, which was actually an “as told to” penned by a writer of romances. But a set of 14 parchments, now collected and exhaustively studied for the first time, give us a raft of new stories about Polo’s journeys and something notably missing from his own account: maps. If genuine,...

In 1491, German cartographer Henricus Martellus created a map of the world that would help Christopher Columbus navigate the Atlantic. Today, the map holds secrets about what Europeans in the 15th Century knew about geography. But unfortunately much of its historic text has faded. But now a team of researchers in the US is using a technique called multispectral imaging to uncover the hidden information that Columbus had at his fingertips. In 1491, cartographer Henricus Martellus created a map of the world that would help Christopher Columbus navigate the Atlantic. Today, it holds secrets into what 15th Century Europeans knew...

While Christopher Columbus is generally credited with having discovered America in 1492, a 1521 Spanish report provides inklings of evidence that there were, in fact, Irish people settled in America prior to Columbus’ journey. […] In 1520, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, a historian and professor, was appointed by Carlos V to be chronicler for the new Council of the Indies. Though Martyr died in 1526, his report, founded on several weeks of interviews, was published posthumously in a book named De Orbe Novo (About the New World). […] While interviewing Spanish colonists, Martyr took note of their vicious treatment of Chicora...

The ship that led Christopher Columbus' mission to discover America has been found after 500 years, it has been claimed. A recent expedition has left experts 'confident' a wreck found off the north coast of Haiti is the the Santa Maria. The 58foot ship was the flagship of the expectation, but its final whereabouts have never been known - until now. The Santa María was belived to be a 58 ft (17.7 m) long boat, described as 'very little larger than 100 toneladas' (About 100 tons, or tuns). It was used as the flagship for the expedition, along with the...

In Columbus’s day, the Moon was often used to get a rough fix of a ship’s longitude at sea. Columbus was especially intrigued with the idea of using lunar eclipses to determine longitude. If you can note the position of the Moon in the sky from one location versus a known longitude during an event— such as first contact of the Moon with the Earth’s umbra during an eclipse —you can gauge your relative longitude east or west of the point. The sky moves 15 degrees, or one hour of right ascension overhead as we rotate under it. One of...

The real story goes something like this: In 1511, messy political squabbling forced Ponce to surrender the governorship of Puerto Rico, an appointment he had held since 1509. As a consolation prize, King Ferdinand offered him Bimini, assuming the stalwart conquistador could finance an expedition and actually find it. J. Michael Francis, a historian at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg who has spent decades studying the Spanish colonies in the Americas , says no mention of a Fountain of Youth occurs in any known documents from Ponce’s lifetime, including contracts and other official correspondence with the Crown. In...

Poor old Chris Columbus. Generations of schoolchildren were taught to praise his exploits, which – after all – included the discovery of America, according to The College Fix. But lately things have taken an ugly turn—and his reputation has suffered irreparable damage, thanks to a claque of revisionist historians who have slowly but surely knocked him off his pedestal. The latest blow to Columbus’s heroic status came from Arizona State University, Tempe, which decided to change Columbus Day to Indigenous People Day. The switch was apparently long overdue, since enlightened souls in the city of Berkeley had launched the first...

When it comes to the birth of America, most of us are working from a stew of elementary school history lessons, Westerns and vague Thanksgiving mythology. And while it's not surprising those sources might biff a couple details, what's shocking is how much less interesting the version we learned was. It turns out our teachers, Hollywood and whoever we got our Thanksgiving mythology from (Big Turkey?) all made America's origin story far more boring than it actually was for some very disturbing reasons. For instance ...

"In fourteen hundred ninety-two/ Columbus sailed the ocean blue. "He had three ships and left from Spain/ He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain." -- Source Unknown I'm old enough to remember a time when Christopher Columbus Day was a national holiday that was widely celebrated rather than shamefully downplayed and derided. Columbus has become the symbolic white devil harbinger of all that is evil about America's founding: genocide and manifest destiny imperialism; slavery and racism; annihilation and exploitation of peaceful, "noble savages" living in harmony with the environment. President Obama seems to echo the sentiments of multiculturalist leftists...

An Italian historian has unveiled a previously unknown document that sheds fresh light on explorer John Cabot’s discovery of Canada — a brief entry in a 516-year-old accounting ledger that shows Cabot had financial backing from a Florence-based bank in England and, most intriguingly, may have had prior knowledge of the distant land his famous 1497 voyage would put on the world map. The Italian-born Cabot is known to have sailed from England in search of the New World three times between 1496 and 1498. He is believed to have reached Newfoundland aboard the Matthew in 1497, but Cabot disappears...

By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and other explorers who followed him may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting. Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported....

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University. “We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident...

Okay, today is Columbus Day observed (real Columbus Day comes in 2 days) and normally I just look at it as a low level holiday in which banks and post offices are closed. However, today I got to thinking: What if Columbus had not discovered America? I don't mean if he tried and failed. What if he never bothered in the first place? He could quite easily have given up on attempting to put together such an expedition. It would have been quite easy to have given up the attempt. One interesting thing is that 1492 was the very first...