Seven pyramids identified on the African island of Mauritius

Seven pyramids identified on the African island of Mauritius

Cantino Planisphere

Seven pyramids have been identified on the African island of Mauritius. Remarkably, they are identical in construction to the ones found on the island of Tenerife, an island on the opposite side of the continent. This underlines the likelihood that one civilisation travelled to various islands off the coast of Africa and built all these structures.

The island of Mauritius is part of the Mascarene Islands and is in the Indian Ocean, about 900km (560 miles) east of Madagascar. The island is 61km long and 47km wide, and lies just north of the Tropic of Capricorn. In origin it is volcanic. The historical record shows that the island was known to Arab and Austronesian sailors as early as the 10th century; Portuguese sailors first visited in 1507. Mauritius was first plotted on a map made by the Italian Alberto Cantino in 1502. This planisphere identifies all three Mascarene islands (Reunion, Mauritius and Rodrigues) and calls them by their Arab names of Dina Margabin, Dina Harobi and Dina Morare.

It is surmised that prior to the Arabs, Mauritius was known to people living on the African coast as well as to the famous Sea Peoples, a confederacy of seafaring raiders that included the proto-Phoenicians. The Greek account of Periplus relates the story of Hanno (Hannan), the Carthaginian navigator who lived in the 5th century BC, and who traversed the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar) in command of ships going to explore the Atlantic coast of Africa.Herodotus describes a Phoenician expedition leaving the Red Sea and traversing the “sea of the south”, and, following the orders of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II (610-595 BC), returning to the Mediterranean Sea through the Pillars of Hercules, which means they must have circumnavigated Africa.