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.īy classical times an alternative idea, that Earth was spherical, had appeared. The modern misconception that people of the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat first entered the popular imagination in the nineteenth century.īelief in a flat Earth is found in mankind's oldest writings. 3rd to 7th centuries) saw occasional arguments in favour of a flat Earth. His writings remained the basis of European astronomy throughout the Middle Ages, although Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ca. Around then Ptolemy derived his maps from a curved globe and developed the system of latitude, longitude, and climes.

Eratosthenes, however, had already calculated that the earth was a sphere as well as its rough circumference by the third century B.C.īy the time of Pliny the Elder in the 1st century, however, the Earth's spherical shape was generally acknowledged among the learned in the western world. It is conjectured that the first person to have advocated a spherical shape of the Earth was Pythagoras (6th century BC), but this idea is not supported by the fact that most presocratic Pythagoreans considered the world to be flat. Greek philosophers from that time period were prone to form conclusions similar to those of Anaximander, who believed the Earth to be a short cylinder with a flat, circular top. In early Classical Antiquity, the Earth was generally believed to be flat. This article focuses on the views about the shape of the earth during the history of Europe, on historical evidence for and against the modern belief that people in Medieval Europe believed that the Earth was flat, on modern believers in a Flat Earth, and on the use of the idea of a Flat Earth in literature and popular culture. The notion of a flat Earth refers to the idea that the inhabited surface of Earth is flat, rather than a curved spherical Earth. This kind of medieval Mappa Mundi illustrate only the reachable side of a round Earth, since it was thought that no one could cross a torrid clime near the equator to the other half of the globe.

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