Post by Leo SgourosPost by defaultOn Tue, 12 Sep 2017 08:04:33 -0700 (PDT), Leo Sgouros
Post by Leo SgourosDefault, please show me evidence that people believed the earth was flat at any time in history.
" Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat Earth cosmography,
including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron
Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India
until the Gupta period (early centuries AD), and China until the 17th
century. That paradigm was also typically held in the aboriginal
cultures of the Americas, and the notion of a flat Earth domed by the
firmament in the shape of an inverted bowl was common in
pre-scientific societies."
Did you notice that paragraph had one cite?
"Their cosmography as far as we know anything about it was practically of one type up til the time of the white man's arrival upon the scene. That of the Borneo Dayaks may furnish us with some idea of it. 'They consider the Earth to be a flat surface, whilst the heavens are a dome, a kind of glass shade which covers the Earth and comes in contact with it at the horizon.'" Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality (repr. Boston: Beacon, 1966) 353; "The usual primitive conception of the world's form ... [is] flat and round below and surmounted above by a solid firmament in the shape of an inverted bowl." H. B. Alexander, The Mythology of All Races 10: North American (repr. New York: Cooper Square, 1964) 24
There have been people who knew the surface of the Earth curved,
so that ships in the distance didn't disappear all at once, but
bit by bit, until one could only see the top of the mast, then nothing.
The same for a rider or wagon on a steppe or prairie. This was, before
scientific examination of the world, specialized knowledge. A sailor or
someone living on a wide grassland may have known it. It was probably
only of use to those dealing with ships or caravans.
Some of the Ancient Greeks figured it out, as did some scholars
in India:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_geodesy
The Muslim scholars knew their Ptolemy and Aristotle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_and_cartography_in_medieval_Islam#Mathematical_geography_and_geodesy
I suspect that, religious considerations aside, whether the Earth
was flat or spherical only mattered to a few, so the issue didn't
come up much.
Kevin R