Shaping the Earth - The Science of Navigation - page 33

For sure, early cultures believed that the world was essentially flat, with
local irregularities. That is, mountains and valleys were superimposed
upon a globally flat surface, rather than upon a spherical surface. Homer,
writing in the ninth century BCE, saw the world as a circular disk—a
plateau surrounded by water, with Hades below and the dome of the sky
above. The Chinese maintained until the seventeenth century that the
world was flat, but most other peoples had abandoned this view fifteen
hundred years before—earlier in the case of classical Greece, as we will
see. 2 A few scholars and Christian dogmatists flatly refused to adopt a well-
rounded view of the world, but most educated people and all mariners
knew di√erent (fig. 2.1).
Before looking at the ancient evidence that led the great majority of
educated Europeans to believe that the world was spherical, I will spend a
paragraph demonstrating that they did so from quite early on, and certainly
in medieval times before the great maritime explorations began. It is sim-
ply a matter of consulting ancient writings. Thus, the Venerable Bede, an
eighth-century English monk and historian of Dark Age England, makes
clear that the earth is a globe, like a ball. Dante Alighieri's masterpiece, The
Divine Comedy , written sometime during the first quarter of the fourteenth
century, portrays the earth as a sphere and takes note of the di√erent stars
that are visible from the southern hemisphere. At the end of that century, a
hundred years before Columbus set out on his first transatlantic voyage,
the English writer Geo√rey Chaucer produced A Treatise on the Astrolabe
for his son, which very clearly displays his view on the spherical shape of
the earth. (Indeed, as we will see, the very existence of the astrolabe is a
sharp reminder that the earth is a sphere.) Many other writings, from many
countries over several centuries, show the ubiquity of this ''modern'' view
of the world. Modern technology leaves twenty-first-century earthlings in
no doubt as to the roundness of their planet (fig. 2.2), but as so many Dark
Age and medieval authors show us, such high-tech confirmation is hardly
essential. 3
So, the belief in a flat earth had fallen flat by late antiquity and certainly
should you feel the need to follow up on this bizarre notion. As Boorstin (1983) says, ''The
greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the oceans was
not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.''
2. On the persistence of the Chinese flat-earth view, see Needham (1959).
3. For Bede and Chaucer's writings, see Harris and Grigsby (2008). Chaucer's Treatise on
the Astrolabe can be read online. Dante's spherical-earth views are discussed in Harley and
Woodward (1987).