This did not settle, however, the question of whether the antipodes were inhabitable, or even reachable.īelief in a flat Earth is found in humankind's oldest writings. With the astrolabe, Arab astronomy reached Europe in the 11th century, and by the 1100s at the latest, the geocentric model had supplanted it in the minds of the learned people of Europe.

The common misconception that people before the age of exploration believed that the earth was flat entered the popular imagination after Washington Irving's publication of The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828.Ī few early Christian writers questioned and even opposed Earth's sphericity on theological grounds. His writings remained the basis of European astronomy throughout the Middle Ages.

At that time Ptolemy derived his maps from a curved globe and developed the system of latitude and longitude.

It is commonly assumed that people from early antiquity generally believed the world was flat, but by the time of Pliny the Elder (1st century) its spherical shape was generally acknowledged. The notion of a Flat Earth refers to the idea that the inhabited surface of the Earth is flat, rather than curved.

Beyond flat earth map