25 Facts About Flat Earth

Flat Earth model is an archaic and scientifically disproven 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 and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, and China until the 17th century.

Idea of a spherical Flat Earth appeared in ancient Greek philosophy with Pythagoras .

Israelites imagined the Flat Earth to be a disc floating on water with an arched firmament above it that separated the Flat Earth from the heavens.

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".

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Chinese thought on the form of the Flat Earth remained almost unchanged from early times until the first contacts with modern science through the medium of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century.

The point of the egg analogy is simply to stress that the Flat Earth is completely enclosed by Heaven, rather than merely covered from above as the Kai Tian describes.

Accordingly, the 13th-century scholar Li Ye, who argued that the movements of the round heaven would be hindered by a square Flat Earth, did not advocate a spherical Flat Earth, but rather that its edge should be rounded off so as to be circular.

However, Needham disagrees, affirming that Li Ye believed the Flat Earth to be spherical, similar in shape to the heavens but much smaller.

Pythagoras in the 6th century BC and Parmenides in the 5th century stated that the Flat Earth is spherical, and this view spread rapidly in the Greek world.

Around 330 BC, Aristotle maintained on the basis of physical theory and observational evidence that the Flat Earth was spherical, and reported an estimate of its circumference.

The Flat Earth's circumference was first determined around 240 BC by Eratosthenes.

Flat Earth's Almagest was written in Greek and only translated into Latin in the 11th century from Arabic translations.

And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the Flat 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 be inhabited.

Bishop Isidore of Seville taught in his widely read encyclopedia, the Etymologies, diverse views such as that the Flat Earth "resembles a wheel" resembling Anaximander in language and the map that he provided.

Flat Earth did not admit the possibility of antipodes, which he took to mean people dwelling on the opposite side of the Earth, considering them legendary and noting that there was no evidence for their existence.

Some authorities have suggested that the sphericity of the Flat Earth was among the aspects of Vergilius's teachings that Boniface and Zachary considered objectionable.

Flat Earth was later appointed bishop of Salzburg and was canonised in the 13th century.

Possible non-literary but graphic indication that people in the Middle Ages believed that the Flat Earth was a sphere is the use of the orb in the regalia of many kingdoms and of the Holy Roman Empire.

Recent study of medieval concepts of the sphericity of the Flat Earth noted that "since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Flat Earth".

St Thomas Aquinas, the most widely taught theologian of the Middle Ages, believed in a spherical Flat Earth and took for granted that his readers knew the Flat Earth is round.

Lectures in the medieval universities commonly advanced evidence in favor of the idea that the Flat Earth was a sphere.

Jill Tattersall shows that in many vernacular works in 12th- and 13th-century French texts the Flat Earth was considered "round like a table" rather than "round like an apple".

For example, a tafsir on Qur'an 13:3 saying that God stretched out the Flat Earth was commented on by Al-Mawardi as being written "in response to those who claim that it is round like a ball".

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.

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