Re: Flat Earth Chronology

[Richard Grandy <rgrandy@RUF.RICE.EDU>]

At 7:24 PM -0700 10/24/99, Jim Green wrote:
> Can someone please give a chronology of the belief in a flat Earth.
> Egyptians? Babylonians? Hebrews? Chinese? Old Testament? Etc?

I can't begin to tackle question 1.


> When did belief in a spherical like Earth become common?

You probably need to say something more about "common".  Hipparchus did a
pretty accurate job of determining the circuferences of the earth in the
second century BC, and by the seocnd century AD the Ptolmaic system of
astronomy had been formulated with a spherical earth in the center of the
spheres of the heavens.  So among astronomers and those educated in
astronomy, the belief became common in the Greek-Roman tradition  at least
by 200 AD and was transmitted intact through Islamic science into Western
Europe later.  There is not much evidence, so far as I know, that the flat
earth view was ever very widely held.


Richard Grandy
Philosophy
Rice University
Houston TX