The widely circulated woodcut is of a man poking his head through the firmament of a flat Earth to see the machines working the spheres.
Flammarion wrote, " A missionary in the Middle Ages tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet." This proved finally, and in a practical way, that the Earth is a globe.ĭuring the 19th century, the Romantic ideas about a European " Dark Age" made the Flat Earth model look more important than it ever had been in history. Portuguese people explored Africa and Asia, Columbus sailed to the Americas (1492) and Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated (sailed all round) the earth (1519-21). The following authors argued for a spherical or ball-shaped earth: King Alfred of the Anglo-Saxons, Hildegard von Bingen, Thomas Aquinas, Snorri Sturluson, Marco Polo, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus Therefore in the Ancient world only sailors, astronomers, philosophers, and theologians would have cared about the Earth's large-scale shape. The large-scale shape of the Earth only matters when considering large distances, as it is hard to see the Earth's curve from the ground. Aristotle knew the Earth was round, that is to say, roughly spherical. From then on, few educated people ever believed in its being flat, though the idea of a flat earth was still common among the less educated. One of the "giveaways" is that ships' masts disappear as they move away from shore.Įratosthenes (276 BC–194 BC) calculated the circumference of the Earth quite well. This was a common belief until the Classical Greeks began to discuss the Earth's shape about the 4th century BC.
Early Mesopotamian maps showed the world as a flat disk floating in the ocean. Belief in a flat Earth is found in the oldest writings. The idea of a flat Earth is that the surface of the Earth is flat (a plane). This kind of medieval mappa mundi illustrates only the reachable side of a round Earth. 15th century adaptation of a T and O map.
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