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The notion of a flat Earth refers to the idea that the inhabited surface of Earth is flat, rather than curved (see Spherical Earth).

It is commonly assumed that people from early antiquity generally believed the world was flat, but by the time of Pliny the Elder (1st century) its spherical shape was generally acknowledged. At that time Ptolemy derived his maps from a curved globe and developed the system of latitude and longitude (see clime). His writings remained the basis of European astronomy throughout the Middle Ages.

The common misconception that people before the age of exploration believed that Earth was flat entered the popular imagination after Washington Irving's publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828. In the United States, this belief persists in the popular imagination, and is even repeated in some widely read textbooks. Thomas Bailey's The American Pageant states that "The superstitious sailors ... grew increasingly mutinous...because they were fearful of sailing over the edge of the world"; however, no such historical account is known.James. W. Loewen, Everything Your History Textbook Got Wrong, (Touchstone Books, 1996), p. 56 Actually, sailors were probably among the first to know of the curvature of Earth from daily observations — seeing how shore landscape features (or masts of other ships) gradually descend/ascend near the horizon.

A few early Christian writers questioned or even opposed the sphericity of the Earth on theological grounds, but these writers are not thought to have been influential in the Middle Ages due to a scarcity of references to their work in medieval writings. The dominant textbooks of the Early Middle Ages supported the sphericity of the Earth. Even before the translation of the works of Aristotle and Ptolemy in the 1100s, the geocentric model had supplanted any doubts about the Earth's sphericity in the minds of the learned people of Europe. This did not settle, however, the question of whether the antipodes were habitable, or even reachable.

Despite the wide availability of scientific knowledge at present, there are still some who believe that Earth is flat. Until recently there was a Flat Earth Society in the USA, some members of which regarded spherical satellite images of the Earth as aberrations.

Antiquity

Belief in a flat Earth is found in humankind's oldest writings. In early Mesopotamian thought, the world was portrayed as a flat disk floating in the ocean, and this forms the premise for early Greek maps like those of Anaximander and Hecataeus.

By classical times an alternative idea, that Earth was spherical, had appeared. This was espoused by Pythagoras apparently on aesthetic grounds, as he also held all other celestial bodies to be spherical. Aristotle provided observational evidence for the spherical Earth:

  • Ships actually recede over the horizon, disappearing hull-first. In a flat-earth model, they should simply get smaller and smaller until no longer visible, assuming that light travels in a straight line.
  • Travelers going south see southern constellations rise higher above the horizon. This is only possible if their "straight up" direction is at an angle to northerners' "straight up". Thus Earth's surface cannot be flat.
  • The border of the shadow of Earth on the Moon during the partial phase of a lunar eclipse is always circular, no matter how high the Moon is over the horizon. Only a sphere casts a circular shadow in every direction, whereas a circular disk casts an elliptical shadow in most directions.

The Earth's circumference was measured around 240 BC by Eratosthenes. Eratosthenes knew that in Syene (now Aswan), in Egypt, the Sun was directly overhead at the summer solstice. He used geometry to come up with a circumference of 252,000 stades, which, depending on the length of the stadion unit, is within 2% and 20% of the actual circumference, 40,008 kilometres. Note that Eratosthenes could only measure the circumference of the Earth by assuming that the distance to the Sun is so great that the rays of sunlight are essentially parallel. A similar measurement, reported in a Chinese mathematical treatise the Zhoubi suanjing (1st c. BC), was used to measure the distance to the Sun by assuming that the Earth was flat.G. E. R. Lloyd, Adversaries and Authorities: Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1996), pp. 59-60.

During this period Earth was generally thought of as divided into climes, with frigid climes at the poles and a deadly torrid clime at the equator. Beyond the torrid clime were the antipodes (people living on the opposite side of a spherical Earth, so called because their feet would be turned towards the opposite direction).

Lucretius was opposed to the concept of a spherical Earth, because he considered the idea of antipodes absurd. But by the 1st century, Pliny the Elder was in a position to claim that everyone agrees on the spherical shape of Earth (Natural History, 2.64), although there continued to be disputes regarding the nature of the antipodes, and how it is possible to keep the ocean in a curved shape. Interestingly, Pliny as an "intermediate" theory considers also the possibility of an imperfect sphere, "shaped like a pinecone". (Natural History, 2.65)

The Early Church

There is evidence that the spherical Earth was accepted by many Christians. For example, Emperor Theodosius II of the Byzantine Empire placed the globus cruciger (which depicts Earth as round) on his coins.

However, the antipodes (thought to be separated from the Mediterranean world by the uncrossable torrid clime) were difficult to reconcile with the Christian view of a unified human race descended from one couple and redeemed by a single Christ. Consequently, some of the Church Fathers questioned their existence and even the roundness of Earth. Saint Augustine (354-430) wrote:

"Those who affirm belief in antipodes do not claim to possess any actual information; they merely conjecture that, since the Earth is suspended within the concavity of the heavens, and there is as much room on the one side of it as on the other, therefore the part which is beneath cannot be void of human inhabitants. They fail to notice that, even should it be believed or demonstrated that the world is round or spherical in form, it does not follow that the part of the Earth opposite to us is not completely covered with water, or that any conjectured dry land there should be inhabited by men. For Scripture, which confirms the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its prophecies, teaches not falsehood; and it is too absurd to say that some men might have set sail from this side and, traversing the immense expanse of ocean, have propagated there a race of human beings descended from that one first man." (De Civitate Dei, 16.9)

Augustine denied that the antipodes were inhabited by men, not the idea of a round Earth. However, the phrase "even should it be believed or demonstrated that the world is round" (Latin: etiamsi figura conglobata et rotunda mundus esse credatur sive aliqua ratione monstretur) suggests that he was skeptical of the claims of the philosophers that the Earth was round, and perhaps that others were as well.

A few authors directly opposed the round Earth:

  • Lactantius (245–325) called it "folly" because people on a sphere would fall down;
  • Saint Cyril of Jerusalem (315–386) saw Earth as a firmament floating on water (though in his case, the relevant quote is found in the course of a sermon to the newly baptized, and it is unclear whether he was speaking poetically or in a physical sense);
  • Saint John Chrysostom (344–408) saw a spherical Earth as contradictory to scripture;
  • Diodorus of Tarsus (d. 394) also argued for a flat Earth;
  • Severian, Bishop of Gabala, (d. 408);
  • The Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes (547) in his Topographia Christiana, where the Covenant Ark was meant to represent the whole universe, argued on theological grounds that the Earth was flat, a parallelogram enclosed by four oceans.
At least one early Christian writer, Basil of Caesarea (329–379), believed the matter to be theologically irrelevant. (Hexaemeron 9:1)

Different historians have maintained that these advocates of the flat Earth were either influential (a view typified by Andrew Dickson White) or relatively unimportant (typified by Jeffrey Russell) in the later Middle Ages. The scarcity of references to their beliefs in later medieval writings convinces most of today's historians that their influence was slight.

The Middle Ages

Early Middle Ages

Europe's view of the shape of the Earth in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages is best expressed by the writings of early Christian scholars:

  • Macrobius (c. 360 - post 422), in his commentary on Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, described the Earth as spherical, and of insignificant size in comparison to the remainder of the cosmos.Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, transl. W. H. Stahl, (New York: Columbia Univ. Pr., 1952), chaps. v-vii, (pp. 200-212). Many early medieval manuscripts of Macrobius include zonal maps showing the Ptolemaic climates derived from the concept of a spherical Earth and a diagram showing the Earth (labeled as globus terrae, the sphere of the Earth) at the center of the hierarchically ordered planetary spheres.B. Eastwood and G. Graßhoff, Planetary Diagrams for Roman Astronomy in Medieval Europe, ca. 800-1500, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 94, 3 (Philadelphia, 2004), pp. 49-50.

  • Boethius (c. 480-524), who also wrote a theological treatise On the Trinity, repeated this model of the Earth as an insignificant point in the center of a spherical cosmos in his influential, and widely translated, Consolation of Philosophy.S. C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1998), pp. 114, 123.

  • The monk Bede (c.672 – 735) wrote in his influential treatise on computus, The Reckoning of Time, that the Earth was round, explaining the unequal length of daylight from "the roundness of the Earth, for not without reason is it called 'the orb of the world' on the pages of Holy Scripture and of ordinary literature. It is, in fact, set like a sphere in the middle of the whole universe." (De temporum ratione, 32). The large number of surviving manuscripts of The Reckoning of Time, copied to meet the Carolingian requirement that all priests should study the computus, indicates that many, if not most, priests were exposed to the idea of the sphericity of the Earth.Faith Wallis, trans., Bede: The Reckoning of Time, (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Pr., 2004), pp. lxxxv-lxxxix. Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham paraphrased Bede into Old English, saying "Now the Earth's roundness and the Sun's orbit constitute the obstacle to the day's being equally long in every land."Ælfric of Eynsham, On the Seasons of the Year, Peter Baker, trans. *

A recent study of medieval concepts of the sphericity of the Earth noted that "since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth."Klaus Anselm Vogel, "Sphaera terrae - das mittelalterliche Bild der Erde und die kosmographische Revolution," PhD dissertation Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, 1995, p. 19.* Of course it was probably not the few noted intellectuals who defined public opinion. It is difficult to tell what the wider population may have thought of the shape of the Earth – if they considered the question at all. It may have been as irrelevant to them as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is to most of our contemporaries. The symbolism of the orb (Globus cruciger), used in imperial regalia from the 5th century onwards has sometimes been interpreted as showing mainstream support for the concept of a spherical world; others maintain that the orb does not represent a spherical Earth at all, but a spherical cosmos, with two hemispherical domes, the upper representing heaven and the lower representing hell.

Later Middle Ages

By the 11th century, Europe had learned of Islamic astronomy, and abundant records suggest that any doubts that Europeans had had in earlier times were generally eliminated. Lectures in the medieval universities commonly advanced evidence in favor of the idea that the Earth was a sphere.E. Grant, Planets. Stars, & Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1994), pp. 626-630. A few examples: the most important and widely taught theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), believed in a spherical Earth. Hermannus Contractus (1013–1054) is among the earliest Christian scholars to estimate the circumference of Earth with Eratosthenes' method. In addition, Dante's Divine Comedy portrays Earth as a sphere.

The Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis (c. 1120), an important manual for the instruction of lesser clergy which was translated into Middle English, Old French, Middle High German, Old Russian, Middle Dutch, Old Norse, Icelandic, Spanish, and several Italian dialects, explicitly refers to a spherical Earth. This supports the contention that the spherical shape of the Earth was common knowledge outside scholarly circles. Likewise, the fact that Bertold von Regensburg (mid-13th century) used the spherical Earth as a sermon illustration shows that he could assume this knowledge among his congregation. The sermon was held in the vernacular (i.e. German as opposed to Latin), and thus was not intended for a learned audience.

However, as late as 1400s, the Spanish theologian Tostatus disputed the existence of any inhabitants at the antipodesA. D. White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1896)*..

Modern times

During the 19th century, the Romantic conception of a European "Dark Age" gave much more prominence to the Flat Earth model than it ever possessed historically. The widely circulated woodcut of a man poking his head through the firmament of a flat Earth to view the mechanics of the spheres, executed in the style of the 16th century cannot be traced to an earlier source than Camille Flammarion's L'Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888, p. 163) *. The woodcut illustrates the statement in the text that a medieval missionary claimed that "he reached the horizon where the Earth and the heavens met", an anecdote that may be traced back to Voltaire, but not to any known medieval source. In its original form, the woodcut included a decorative border that places it in the 19th century; in later publications, some claiming that the woodcut did, in fact, date to the 16th century, the border was removed. Flammarion, according to anecdotal evidence, had commissioned the woodcut himself. In any case, no source of the image earlier than Flammarion's book is known.

Russell, a professor of history at Santa Barbara who has written widely on mediaeval religion, heresy and witchcraft, explored the issue in Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. Russell claims that the Flat Earth theory is a fable used to impugn pre-modern civilisation, especially that of the Middle Ages in Europe. Today essentially all professional mediaevalists agree with Russell that the "mediaeval flat Earth" is a nineteenth-century fabrication, and that the few verifiable "flat earthers" were the exception.

From a European perspective, Portuguese exploration of Africa and Asia in the 15th century removed any serious doubts, and Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation any remaining ones.

Modern people who do not accept the spherical Earth and base this opinion on Scripture do not represent a continuing school of Biblical exegesis. Some Christians following what they saw as a literal interpretation of scripture tried to revive Flat Earth thinking in the 19th century. In 1898 during his solo circumnavigation of the world Joshua Slocum encounted such a group in the Transvaal Republic. President Kruger berated him, telling him "you don't mean around the world; it is impossible! You mean in the world!"Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World, (New York: The Century Company, 1900), chaps. 17-18.*

The last known group, the Flat Earth Society, kept the concept alive and at one time claimed a few thousand followers. The society declined in the 1990s following a fire at its headquarters in California and vanished from public visibility after the death of its last president, Charles K. Johnson, in 2001.Donad E. Simanek, The Flat Earth.*

The Flat Earth in popular culture

In fiction

  • E. A. Abbott's satire Flatland (1884) is set in an entirely two-dimensional world.

  • In Rudyard Kipling's The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat, the unnamed narrator and some friends are unjustly fined for a minor offence by a crooked village magistrate and his accomplices in the police. By way of revenge, they spread the rumour that a Parish Council meeting had voted in favour of a flat Earth. The village is ridiculed in the press, and a popular song entitled The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat sweeps the nation. When the narrator visits the House of Commons and observes the Members of Parliament singing the song, he reflects that he may have gone too far.

  • Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels (1983 onwards) are set on a disc-shaped world resting on the backs of four huge elephants which are in turn standing on the back of an enormous turtle. He had earlier explored a similar setting in Strata (1981).

In other contexts

  • The Catalan songwriter Quimi Portet released, in 2004, an album called "La Terra és Plana" (that in Catalan means "The Earth is Flat") and a single with the same title.

  • The Golden Sun video game series is set in a flat world called Weyard.

  • Creation in the role playing game Exalted is a flat world thousands of miles in extent.

  • Ernie Kovacs, in a radio skit called "Mr. Question Man", put a twist on the usual stereotyped skepticism of the round Earth. An alleged listener's question was, "If the Earth is round, why don't people fall off?" Kovacs' answer: "What you've stated is a common misconception. People are falling off all the time!"

  • Flip Wilson, in an old standup routine playing Christopher Columbus, put a different spin on the old joke. Arguing with someone over whether to take his famous voyage, he was told, "Don't you know the world is square?" He replied, "It sure is!"

  • In Cow & Chicken after Chicken and Cow were playing with the globe, their parents confiscated the globe and taught them that the Earth is flat like a pancake.

Notes

See also

Further reading

  • Gingerich, O. 1992. "Astronomy in the age of Columbus". Scientific American, 267(5), (November), 66-71. (An expansion of some of Russell’s historical material, with comments on the subsequent Copernican Revolution.)
  • Gould, S.J. 1996. "The late birth of a flat Earth". In: Dinosaur in a haystack, Jonathan Cape, London, 3-40. (Reprinted from "The persistently flat Earth", Natural History, 103, March 1994, 12-19. Draws extensively from Russell and discusses the way a desire to see "progress" has led to the rewriting of history and to the advocacy of a warfare between science and religion).
  • Jones, Charles W. 1934. "The Flat Earth". Thought, 9, 296–307. An early critique of the "Flat Earth thesis" by an expert on Bede and Early Medieval England.
  • Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Inventing the Flat Earth. Praeger Paperback, 1997. ISBN 027595904X; see his summary.
  • Tyler, D.J. 1996. "The impact of the Copernican Revolution on biblical interpretation". Origins, July (No. 21), 2-8. (Discusses the "language of appearance" used in the Bible and the way hermeneutical issues were clarified by the Copernican revolution. The principles developed in this article are directly applicable to any claim that the Bible "teaches a Flat Earth".)
  • White, Andrew D. 1896. A History of The Warfare Of Science With Theology in Christendom.

External links

Earth | Obsolete scientific theories

Flache Erde | Plata Tero | Terra plana | Platt jord

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Flat Earth".

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