Did our ancestors really think the world was flat?
HistoryExtra podcast
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The Origins of the Earth
Socrates assumed the earth was a disc because that's what people generally felt at the time. Aristotle started to pull together evidence that perhaps the earth is spherical. Doxus travelled quite widely and one of the things he noted was that as you travel south, you start to see stars in the sky that you can't see from Greece. But once you get to Egypt, it's really very obvious if rather low in the southern sky. And that's a very odd thing. If the earth is flat, everyone should see the stars in the same way everywhere. So they had to redefine the meaning of the word downwards in order to explain how the earth can possibly be a sphere.
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