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Flat Earth is an archaic and scientifically disproven conception of the Earth's shape as a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat-Earth cosmography.
The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in ancient Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC). However, most pre-Socratics (6th–5th century BC) retained the flat-Earth model. In the early 4th century BC, Plato wrote about a spherical Earth. By about 330 BC, his former student Aristotle had provided strong empirical evidence for a spherical Earth. Knowledge of the Earth's global shape gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world.[1][2][3][4] By the early period of the Christian Church, the spherical view was widely held, with some notable exceptions.
It is a historical myth that medieval Europeans generally thought the Earth was flat.[5] This myth was created in the 17th century by Protestants to argue against Catholic teachings.[6] Despite the scientific fact and obvious effects of Earth's sphericity, pseudoscientific[7] flat-Earth conspiracy theories are espoused by modern flat Earth societies and, increasingly, by unaffiliated individuals using social media.[8][9]
History
Belief in flat Earth
West Asia
Further information: Egyptian mythology and Biblical cosmology
Imago Mundi Babylonian map, the oldest known world map, 6th century BC Babylonia
In early Egyptian[10] 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."[11]
The Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts of ancient Egypt show a similar cosmography; Nun (the Ocean) encircled nbwt ("dry lands" or "Islands").[12][13][14][full citation needed]
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.[15] The sky was a solid dome with the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars embedded in it.[16]
Greece
Poets
Both Homer[17] and Hesiod[18] described a disc cosmography on the Shield of Achilles.[19][20] This poetic tradition of an Earth-encircling (gaiaokhos) sea (Oceanus) and a disc also appears in Stasinus of Cyprus,[21] Mimnermus,[22] Aeschylus,[23] and Apollonius Rhodius.[24]
Homer's description of the disc cosmography on the shield of Achilles with the encircling ocean is repeated far later in Quintus Smyrnaeus' Posthomerica (4th century AD), which continues the narration of the Trojan War.[25]
Philosophers
Possible rendering of Anaximander's world map[26]
Several pre-Socratic philosophers believed that the world was flat: Thales (c. 550 BC) according to several sources,[27] and Leucippus (c. 440 BC) and Democritus (c. 460–370 BC) according to Aristotle.[28][29][30]
Thales thought that the Earth floated in water like a log.[31] It has been argued, however, that Thales actually believed in a spherical Earth.[32][33] Anaximander (c. 550 BC) believed that the Earth was a short cylinder with a flat, circular top that remained stable because it was the same distance from all things.[34][35] Anaximenes of Miletus believed that "the Earth is flat and rides on air; in the same way the Sun and the Moon and the other heavenly bodies, which are all fiery, ride the air because of their flatness".[36] Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 500 BC) thought that the Earth was flat, with its upper side touching the air, and the lower side extending without limit.[37]
Belief in a flat Earth continued into the 5th century BC. Anaxagoras (c. 450 BC) agreed that the Earth was flat,[38] and his pupil Archelaus believed that the flat Earth was depressed in the middle like a saucer, to allow for the fact that the Sun does not rise and set at the same time for everyone.[39]
Historians
Hecataeus of Miletus believed that the Earth was flat and surrounded by water.[40] Herodotus in his Histories ridiculed the belief that water encircled the world,[41] yet most classicists agree that he still believed Earth was flat because of his descriptions of literal "ends" or "edges" of the Earth.[42]
Northern Europe
The ancient Norse and Germanic peoples believed in a flat-Earth cosmography with the Earth surrounded by an ocean, with the axis mundi, a world tree (Yggdrasil), or pillar (Irminsul) in the centre.[43][44] In the world-encircling ocean sat a snake called Jormungandr.[45] The Norse creation account preserved in Gylfaginning (VIII) states that during the creation of the Earth, an impassable sea was placed around it:[46]
And Jafnhárr said: "Of the blood, which ran and welled forth freely out of his wounds."
