This pro­gramme is now avail­able on Mix­cloud to Lis­ten Again.

In this mon­th’s edi­tion of First Sun­days, we’re tak­ing a musi­cal jour­ney through the Ancient World — and take a trip to the Moon!  Tune in at 2pm Sec­ond Life Time on Sun­day, Octo­ber 5th for a pro­gramme that lit­er­al­ly cov­ers a lot of ground, inspired by the mys­te­ri­ous Piri Reis map.

This map was  com­piled in 1513 by the Ottoman sea-cap­­tain Had­ji Muhid­din Piri Ibn Had­ji Mehmed from a num­ber of sources includ­ing a map cre­at­ed by Christo­pher Colum­bus. It was dis­cov­ered in the Library of the Top­kapi Palace in Istan­bul, where it remains today, in 1929. It shows a great many parts of the world in unusu­al­ly high (though not the high­est) detail for the peri­od, includ­ing the East­ern coast of South Amer­i­ca. Only part of the map is still extant.

It has been sug­gest­ed that the map shows the coast of Antar­ti­ca as it would be with­out any ice-cov­­er, and thus it has been con­jec­tured that the map was based on pre­vi­ous charts cre­at­ed by some advanced pre-Clas­si­­cal civil­i­sa­tion. In fact it’s more like­ly that it’s the coast of South Amer­i­ca bent round to fit the parchment.

The music in today’s pro­gramme is large­ly, but not exclu­sive­ly, instru­men­tal, with con­ven­tion­al and elec­tron­ic instru­men­ta­tion. We do hope you enjoy the journey.

Elrik Mer­lin presents.