Current Events > Did you ever believe that ancient people thought the earth was flat?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I did till high school.
In HS I took ap college credit classes that dispelled such a myth.

How funny that up to that point education + media essentially lied to me and other children my age.
Guessing anyone not in college courses continued to believe it.

how ancient?

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monkmith posted...

how ancient?

1700s and before

darkphoenix181 posted...

monkmith posted...

how ancient?

1700s and before

You badly need to rework your definition of ancient
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darkphoenix181 posted...

I did till high school.
In HS I took ap college credit classes that dispelled such a myth.

How funny that up to that point education + media essentially lied to me and other children my age.
Guessing anyone not in college courses continued to believe it.

But there definitely were, and still are, people who think the world is flat.
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Of course at some point, if you go back far enough. But iirc, it really doesn't take that much understanding, or advanced mathmatics for that matter, to prove that Earth is a sphere.

Edit: Didn't realize that I hadn't refreshed the topic page in 4 hours.

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There's also what the peasants understood, and the elites.
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I mean I guess the back of a turtle shell is sort of flat.

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Already the Bible has passages that tell us people back then knew the Earth was round. The ancient Greeks probably knew as well. Most likely any civilization that looked at stars knew this

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The whole point with Christopher Columbus trip was that Earth was round and that sailing West was a quicker way to get that expensive Asian spice compared to sailing around Africa, when did you believe that he did this trip?
After the 1700s?

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I was taught it in school and never thought to question it. Only found out when I was well into my 20s.

Then again it wasnt a piece of information I thought about often or valued highly. When someone said oh actually by then nobody thought the earth was flat I was just like oh, cool. >_>

Random anecdote. The first time I was exposed to the Columbus was a genocidal piece of crap plot twist, was from my 7th grade history teacher. so he was probably the most progressive history teacher I had up to that point, but he still showed us some old Columbus movie where proving the earth wasnt flat was a major plot point lol

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some people know thousands years ago, maybe even more but the knowledge might never recorded since it could be predate written history based on prehistoric navigation skills

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth

"Belief in flat Earth

The Israelites also imagined the Earth to be a disc floating on water with an arched firmament above it that separated the Earth from the heavens.[13] The sky was a solid dome with the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars embedded in it.[14]

In early Egyptian[8] and Mesopotamian thought, the world was portrayed as a disk floating in the ocean. A similar model is found in the Homeric account from the 8th century BC in which "Okeanos, the personified body of water surrounding the circular surface of the Earth, is the begetter of all life and possibly of all gods."[9]

The Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts of ancient Egypt show a similar cosmography; Nun (the Ocean) encircled nbwt ("dry lands" or "Islands").[10][11][12][full citation needed]"

"The flat Earth model is an archaic conception of Earth's shape as a plane or disk. 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.

The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in ancient Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC), although most pre-Socratics (6th5th century BC) retained the flat Earth model. In the early 4th century BC Plato wrote about a spherical Earth, and by about 330 BC his former student Aristotle provided evidence for the spherical shape of the Earth on empirical grounds. Knowledge of the spherical Earth gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world from then on."

"The influential theologian and philosopher Saint Augustine, one of the four Great Church Fathers of the Western Church, similarly objected to the "fable" of antipodes:[78]

But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the Earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the Earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part that is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the Earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled. For Scripture, which proves the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its prophecies, gives no false information; and it is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man"

"[Augustine] was familiar with the Greek theory of a spherical Earth, nevertheless, (following in the footsteps of his fellow North African, Lactantius), he was firmly convinced that the Earth was flat, was one of the two biggest bodies in existence and that it lay at the bottom of the universe. Apparently Augustine saw this picture as more useful for scriptural exegesis than the global Earth at the centre of an immense universe."
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Here is an interesting bit, flat earth theory was the main idea in China until the 1600s

"East Asia
Further information: Chinese astronomy

A spherical terrestrial globe was introduced to Yuan-era Khanbaliq (i.e. Beijing) in 1267 by the Persian astronomer Jamal ad-Din, but it is not known to have made an impact on the traditional Chinese conception of the shape of the Earth.[126] As late as 1595, an early Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, recorded that the Ming-dynasty Chinese say: "The Earth is flat and square, and the sky is a round canopy; they did not succeed in conceiving the possibility of the antipodes."[54] The universal belief in a flat Earth is confirmed by a contemporary Chinese encyclopedia from 1609 illustrating a flat Earth extending over the horizontal diametral plane of a spherical heaven.[54]

In the 17th century, the idea of a spherical Earth spread in China due to the influence of the Jesuits, who held high positions as astronomers at the imperial court.[127] Matteo Ricci, in collaboration with Chinese cartographers and translator Li Zhizao, published the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu in 1602, the first Chinese world map based on European discoveries.[128] The astronomical and geographical treatise Gezhicao () written in 1648 by Xiong Mingyu () explained that the Earth was spherical, not flat or square, and could be circumnavigated.[127]

In ancient China, the prevailing belief was that the Earth was flat and square, while the heavens were round,[46] an assumption virtually unquestioned until the introduction of European astronomy in the 17th century.[47][48][49] The English sinologist Cullen emphasizes the point that there was no concept of a round Earth in ancient Chinese astronomy:[50]

Chinese thought on the form of the Earth remained almost unchanged from early times until the first contacts with modern science through the medium of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century. While the heavens were variously described as being like an umbrella covering the Earth (the Kai Tian theory), or like a sphere surrounding it (the Hun Tian theory), or as being without substance while the heavenly bodies float freely (the Hsan yeh theory), the Earth was at all times flat, although perhaps bulging up slightly. "
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but has anyone here actually flown around it huh yeah didn't think so flat earth 1 you guys nothin'
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I'm not one to pretend that modern people are any more intelligent than ancient people but there was that guy who thought he could become immortal by ingesting random metal pills.

The metal was mercury btw.

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