I am a great fan of Graham Hancock: in his book, Fingerprints of the Gods, he theorizes about a lost, advanced human civilization that was wiped out by a now proven meteor strike that happened about 12,000 years ago. Fascinating reading! One of the proofs he uses are these maps that date from 1450 thru the 16th century that accurately portray coasts and geographical features that the mapmakers should not have known because areas were not “discovered” yet. HIs compelling theory is that these mapmakers had access to ancient maps from this pre-historic civilization that had a global empire.
However, I recently came across the book, 1434: The Year a Magnificent Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance. Most of the aforementioned maps can be explained as duplicates of Chinese maps because, at the time, China was a world-wide maritime power under the great admiral, Zheng He.
So, quite a few of the great lights of the early European Renaissance, including Leonardo da Vinci, were merely copying Chinese encyclopedias that were made available after the 1434 official Chinese delegation to Pope Eugenius IV.
Menzies argues that many of Da Vinci’s famous technical drawings—including his designs for flying machines, parachutes, complex gearing, and weaponry—were heavily influenced by, or directly copied from, Chinese engineering treatises. Specifically, he points to the Yongle Dadian (the massive Ming Dynasty encyclopedia) and older Chinese agricultural and mechanical works like the Nong Shu (Book of Agriculture), which featured advanced hydraulic pumps and gear systems centuries before the Renaissance.
While history credits Johannes Gutenberg with inventing movable type in Europe around 1440, Menzies suggests that the core technology arrived via the 1434 Chinese delegation. China had been using woodblock and movable ceramic/metal type for hundreds of years. The introduction of these concepts to Italy, according to 1434, provided the mechanical framework that Gutenberg later adapted.
The European shift from a geocentric (Earth-centered) model to a more mathematically rigorous understanding of the cosmos is often attributed strictly to Renaissance minds. However, Menzies notes that Chinese astronomers under the Ming court had already calculated the lunar month with stunning accuracy and possessed sophisticated star charts and calendar systems, which he claims were shared with European scholars in Florence.
Ultimately, reading history through the lenses of Graham Hancock and Gavin Menzies forces us to ask a profound question: Are the great leaps of human history born of sudden, isolated genius, or are they the echoes of older, forgotten brilliance? While Hancock looks backward into the deep mist of prehistory to find a lost, global civilization wiped out by a cataclysm, Menzies finds a much more recent, earthly explanation just across the silk roads and oceans of the 15th century. Whether these anomalous early maps were inherited from Hancock’s ancient, prehistoric mariners or copied from the grand, seafaring fleets of Zheng He, both authors challenge the conventional, Eurocentric narrative of progress. They suggest that the “rebirth” of Western civilization wasn’t an awakening from scratch, but rather a grand game of historical connect-the-dots—proving that sometimes, the most revolutionary step forward is simply knowing where to look in the past.