In the Ancient world, Atlas held a globe. When did humans start thinking the earth was flat?

Question

In ancient sculptures and drawings, the Earth was depicted as being round. Atlas was shown as holding the Earth in the form of a globe. At what point did "flat earth" become the dominent theory?

Answer 1

Who knows what this or that uneducated person thought, but if you're referring to the educated --leaders and elites-- the answer is simple: they DIDN'T!

Hetzer could not be more wrong. His caricature of the "Dark Ages" (a term most historians long ago set aside as inaccurate) is about as ignorant as he seems to think the people of those centuries were. On the contrary, there was much intellectual vitality, and advancement in many fields -- technological (many key inventions, e.g., in agriculture and navigation, including those that made the "Age o Discovery" possible), scholarly (those 'ignorant' religious folks FOUNDED the university system), economic (beginnings of modern economic systems, stock companies, banking), social and governmental (foundations of modern legal and political structures, end of Roman system built almost entirely on slavery).

As for the question at hand, the notion that most educated people of Columbus's day thought the world flat is total nonsense -- a lie spread by later determined opponents of religion (from Voltaire to Huxley to A.D. White, to Sagan and Dawkins).

In fact,

"All educated persons of Columbus’ day, very much including the Roman Catholic prelates, knew the earth was round. The Venerable Bede (c. 673-735) taught that the world was round, as did Bishop Virgilius of Salzburg (c. 720-784), Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), and Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224-74). . . . . Sphere was the title of the most popular medieval textbook on astronomy, written by the English scholastic John of Sacrobosco (c. 1200-1256)"
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17713/article_detail.asp

Note that Columbus's proposed voyage was NOT opposed because some prelates thought he'd "fall of the edge of the earth"! Rather, they believed the world was much larger than HE his calculations (and incidentally, they were right!!) so that one could not safely make such a long voyage.

Sadly, the anti-religious bias that perpetuates the popular notion of the "Dark Ages", keeps turning up. Even Daniel Borstein gets it wrong. In his book *The Discoverers* he suggests that the Church "forgot" the world was round but rediscovered in perhaps a century before Columbus --but his evidence is pitifully thin (and the examples above, with many others, contradict him).

Answer 2

Atlas sided with the Titans in their war (known as the Titanomachy) against the Olympians. His brothers Prometheus, Epimetheus and Menoetius weighed the odds and betrayed the other Titans by an alliance with the Olympians. When the Titans were defeated, many of them were confined to Tartaros, but Zeus condemned Atlas to stand at the western edge of the earth and hold up the heavens on his shoulders, to prevent the two from resuming their primordial embrace.Since the middle of the sixteenth century, any collection of cartographic maps has come to be called an atlas. Gerardus Mercator was the first to use the word in this way, and he actually depicted the astronomer king.

Atlas continues to be a commonly used icon in western culture (and advertising), as a symbol of strength or stoic endurance. He is often shown kneeling on one knee while supporting an enormous round globe on his back and shoulders. The globe originally represented the celestial sphere of ancient astronomy, rather than the earth. The use of the term atlas as a name for collections of terrestrial maps and the modern understanding of the earth as a sphere have combined to inspire the many depictions of Atlas' burden as the earth

Answer 3

Very few humans ever thought the world was flat in recorded, due to the simple fact that when one looks at the horizon one can see the curvature of the earth, and the fact that if one watches a ship sail out to sea, it sinks below the horizon before it actually gets too small to see (unless you have poor eyesight, of course).

It is a modern myth that people thought the earth was flat. As for the middle ages (since they have been brought up), they only maintained the "truths" described in ancient greek texts (which were given the same weight as the bible). Thus, Copernicus and the likes were supressed due to Greek incompetence, really, and Medieval Europe's willingness to believe in the Greeks.

Answer 4

Atlas was holding not the globe but the hemisphere that forms the sky.

I suppose that thinking of earth as a flat however with some sort of curvature is just a primal belief, due to the fact you can easily observe distinct horizon.

Answer 5

yup shorty is right, he is holding up the heavens-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(mythology), can't say the flat earth ever was the dominant theory, as far back as 200BC the fact that the earth is round and its circumference was proven-http://inkido.indiana.edu/a100/earthmoon6.html, however this was mostly lost on the Europeans throughout the dark ages, but by the time of Columbus, the round earth theory was adopted by most thinkers, Then Magellan proved it by circling the globe, Galileo proved it astronomically 50 years later or there abouts.

Answer 6

the more ancient we go or the further back we go the more civilized we seem to become
Atlantis was suposed to be full of technolegy,MU,UR.Babylon were suposed to be exstremly civilized and knowlegeble .ancient India talks about battles in the skies between aliens.
the Egyuptians and Central Americans have architecture or constructions ,we cannot understand today and dito with the asstrology and biology
after the ice age I think we started again at cave man level
maybe we get more stupid with time

the flat world was from the dark or middle ages
before that the vikings,Irish Monks ,and pheunicians were sailing the oceans with out falling off.

Answer 7

The flat earth theory was relegated to the ignorant peasants thosands of years ago and never returned to being the dominant theory...It makes a good tale but that's about it...

Answer 8

After the Roman empire collapsed, humanity was thrust into the dark ages. Religion became absolute, and priests imposed their own tainted version of the world that was unquestioned, and if anyone did, they were branded as witches or for practicing heresy, and executed. It wasn't until the age of discovery, the 1500s, that thinking once more began to become scientific in nature, the world was thought of as round again, and new ideas were allowed to spawn and grow. Humanity had to relearn all the knowledge that the ancients already knew, and in fact, we are still learning today.

Answer 9

If I remember correctly, Atlas was not holding up the earth, but rather the spheres that existed in the heavens.

Answer 10

Flat in the fact that there was as edge.

They knew the world had some degree of curvature