Knowledge of Almea's shape

[Brel]

People in our world these days like to insist (and then promptly laugh at) that certain people and cultures were convinced the Earth was flat, with varying degrees of truthfulness as regards the extent of said person's/culture's actual knowledge.

So. Which cultures in Almea's history knew the truth, and which thought it to be as flat as a ktuvok's sense of humor? Did any people and cultures go against the grain long after Almea's shape was discovered, and continue to proclaim that it is flat?

[Adso de Fimnu]

I would assume that the iliî informed the human cultures near their land settlements about the true nature of Almea... I also am curious about the peoples that were mistaken, and the nature of their mistakenness.

[Aurora Rossa]

People in our world these days like to insist (and then promptly laugh at) that certain people and cultures were convinced the Earth was flat, with varying degrees of truthfulness as regards the extent of said person's/culture's actual knowledge.

You make sound as though said people didn't believe the Earth was flat, which I thought was a very common belief.

[Brel]

You make sound as though said people didn't believe the Earth was flat, which I thought was a very common belief.

/me sighs

Of course plenty of people actually did. But today the subject is mainly broached by the "Hey guys, did you know Columbus thought the Earth was flat?" types. I was bringing it up in that vein as well, as an attempt to take a stab at humor.

Now, back to the original topic of discussion.

[Neek]

Uhm... who is the lot that thought the world flat? Most of the world, by the sixth century BC, already knew the world was spherical--though debates were common, I won't deny. Oh wait, the Chinese thought the world was flat until the 17th century. They were sort of late in the game.

Flat earth belief is not a product of sheer ignorance, but an isolated concept when empires spanned few areas and the known world was quite small. As empires gained power and territory that far exceeded their own corner and rational thought became quite prevalent, it was easy to provide logical answers about the earth's orbit. Europe in the middle ages did not admit a flat earth idea about the world, rather they knew and were affirmed by Islamic astronomers (China is a fluke. I don't know why).

As for Almea, I would believe that a round earth idea was quite common early in the Cadhinorian empire across that continent, with debates raging about it. But into modern days, such an idea would be dispelled.

[James0289]

Didn't some people used to think it was pear-shaped (or am I just making that up?)? There was an episode of QI a long time ago -- an excellent programme if you haven't heard of it; it stands for Quite Interesting -- that said something about this. I'll try to look for it on YouTube.

EDIT: Just remembered I had this!

Note -- all spelling mistakes are my own!

What shape did Columbus think the Earth was?
a) Flat
b) Round
c) Pear-shaped
d) An oblate spheroid

Columbus himself never said the world was round -- he thought it was pear-shaped and about a quarter of its actual size.
Despite his later reputation, his voyage of 1492 wasn't intended to discover a new continent but to prove that Asia was much closer than anyone imagined. He was wrong.
Columbus never actually set foot on mainland America -- the closest he ever came was the Bahamas (probably the small island of Plana Cays) -- but made his crew swear an oath that, if asked, they would say they'd reached India. He died in Valladolid in 1506 and remained convinced to the end that he'd reached to coast of Asia.

...

What shape did medieval people think the Earth was?
Not what you think.
Since about the fourth century BC, almost no one, anywhere, has believed that the earth is flat. However, if you did want to show the earth as a flat disc, you'd end up with something every similar to the United Nations Flag.
Belief in a flat earth may not even have actually originated until the nineteenth century. The guilty text was Washington Irving's semi-fictional The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) which, incorrectly, suggests that Columbus's voyage was made to prove the world was round.
The idea of a flat earth was first seriously put forward in 1838 by the eccentric Englishman Samuel Birley Rowbotham who published a sixteen-page paper entitled: 'Zetetic Astronomy: A Description of Several Experiments which Prove that the Surface of the Sea is a Perfect Plane and that the Earth is Not a Globe' ('Zetetic' derives from the Greek zetein, meaning 'to search, or inquire').
More than a century later, a member of the Royal Astronomical Society and devout Christian called Samuel Shenton re-branded the Universal Zetetic Society as the International Flat Earth Society.
The NASA space programme of the 1960s, culminating in the lunar landings, should have buried the issue. But Shenton was undeterred. Looking at the photographs of a spherical earth taken from space, he commented: 'It's easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye.' The Apollo landings were, apparently a Hollywood hoax, scripted by Arthur C. Clarke. Membership shot up.
Shenton died in 1971 but not before choosing his successor as President of the Society. The odd but charismatic Charles K. Johnson took over and made the Society a rallying point for a heroic, homespun 'anti-Big Science' movement. By the early 1990s, membership had surged to over 3,500.
Johnson, who lived and worked in the vast flatness of the Mojave desert, propsed a world in which we live on a disc, with the North Pole at its centre, surrounded by a 150-foot-high perimeter wall of ice. The sun and moon are both 32 miles in diameter, and the stars are 'about as far away as San Francisco is from Boston'.
Johnson's desert hideaway burnt down in 1995, destroying all the Society's archives and membership lists. Johnson died in 2001, by which time the Society had shrunk to a few hundred members. It exists today solely as a web forum, www.theflatearthsociety.org, with around 800 registered members.

And apparently bees first worked out the world was round, not humans!

[Southtown]

Yes, it's indeed a myth that midieval people thought the world to be flat. They weren't as ignorant as we like to imagine. If my knowledge is correct, the Greek had already discovered the earth's spherical shape (perhaps even a civilization before them).

Note -- all spelling mistakes are my own!

There's a comma in the site's url, causing a "web page not found" error.

[James0289]

Note -- all spelling mistakes are my own!

There's a comma in the site's url, causing a "web page not found" error.

Fixed!

[Exez]

Yes, it's indeed a myth that midieval people thought the world to be flat. They weren't as ignorant as we like to imagine. If my knowledge is correct, the Greek had already discovered the earth's spherical shape (perhaps even a civilization before them).

That doesn't mean that later civilizations can't forget or even challenge theories of the older ones.

I always thought that Medievalers ignored the ancient Greek idea, or just disagreed with ir.

Or i am wrong, but it's an explanation

[So Haleza Grise]

Yes, it's indeed a myth that midieval people thought the world to be flat. They weren't as ignorant as we like to imagine. If my knowledge is correct, the Greek had already discovered the earth's spherical shape (perhaps even a civilization before them).

That doesn't mean that later civilizations can't forget or even challenge theories of the older ones.

I always thought that Medievalers ignored the ancient Greek idea, or just disagreed with ir.

Or i am wrong, but it's an explanation

No, in the middle ages educated people were well aware the Earth was round.

The easiest way to demonstrate this is the globus cruciger or orb representing Christ's domination over the earth, a standard part of medieval regalia. It was a sphere surmounted by a cross.

[Krsont]

Maybe the Zone of Fire influences thoughts on the subject? It makes sense that Almean cultures might think the Zone is the edge of the world.

[con quesa]

Speaking of the Zone of Fire, how exactly did the Cuezi, living in Eretald and separated from the actual Zone by thousands of miles of rainforest, know what and where the Zone of Fire is? For that matter, how did any of Erelae's civilizations, except the far northern ones close to the equator, know about it? I would imagine they learned about it from the Ilii, but how would they have known what the Ilii were referring to?

[zompist]

Speaking of the Zone of Fire, how exactly did the Cuezi, living in Eretald and separated from the actual Zone by thousands of miles of rainforest, know what and where the Zone of Fire is?

They didn't know much about it— only what's written in the Count of Years, which describes it as the remnant of a star. Of course this account derives from the iliu, and no Cuzeian ever saw the Zone of Fire.

As for the original question, Adso is right: the iliu told anyone who was interested that Almea was a sphere. (So did the ktuvoks, for that matter.) Some nations, notably the Skourenes, deduced this on their own (they observed such things as occlusion of distant sails below the horizon).

Other cultures at least began with the idea of a flat earth— the Wede:i, the people of Arcél. Some cultures had conflicting ideas and argued about it, notably the Axunemi. At least one scholar maintained that we live on the inside of a sphere— because gravity must draw us toward the higher mureshi, and the 74 higher mureshi could only fit outside the sphere.

[Oric]

The people of Columbus' time most definitely did not believe in the Earth being flat. From Wikipedia: "The modern misconception that people of the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat first entered the popular imagination in the nineteenth century, thanks largely to the publication of Washington Irving's fantasy The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828."
I would think someone with any experience in sailing would notice that the earth curves. I mean, look at the horizon. It looks round.

Also, Christopher Columbus was an asshole.

[Brel]

Oric, we know.

[Mornche Geddick]

Wilbur Glenn Voliva travelled around the world several times trying to preach his flat-earth theory.

[ketske]

He traveled around the world?

[Salmoneus]

Oh yes. Right along around the edge.

[vohpenonomae]

Oh yes. Right along around the edge.

I often wonder how flat-Earthers would explain equatorial circumnavigation of the planet, other than denying it ever happens or has happened.

[Wycoval]

I often wonder how flat-Earthers would explain equatorial circumnavigation of the planet, other than denying it ever happens or has happened.

Black holes. Duh!

[4pq1injbok]

I often wonder how flat-Earthers would explain equatorial circumnavigation of the planet, other than denying it ever happens or has happened.

You can still go around in all manner of big circles on a flat Earth... though I guess circumnavigators would have to constantly be turning inward while they think they're going straight. Must be the same force what stops us from falling off the edge.

[Aurora Rossa]

I often wonder how flat-Earthers would explain equatorial circumnavigation of the planet, other than denying it ever happens or has happened.

I dunno, denialists can get pretty weird after all. I'm sure they have plenty of conspiracy theories to explain away any inconvenient evidence.

[vohpenonomae]

I often wonder how flat-Earthers would explain equatorial circumnavigation of the planet, other than denying it ever happens or has happened.

You can still go around in all manner of big circles on a flat Earth... though I guess circumnavigators would have to constantly be turning inward while they think they're going straight. Must be the same force what stops us from falling off the edge.

Five hundred years ago, this might have worked as an explanation; you could never pinpoint your location relative to anything else exactly. But with modern GPS systems, it'd be easy to see whether you're going around in big circles or not. Eh; I just wonder about the psychology of people who seem to want to believe horrendously wrong things, and the kinds of explanations they use to justify their beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. (You could say that all the satellites just happen to be going around in big circles as well, and we don't realize it--which might work.)

[Mornche Geddick]

I often wonder how flat-Earthers would explain equatorial circumnavigation of the planet, other than denying it ever happens or has happened.

You can still go around in all manner of big circles on a flat Earth... though I guess circumnavigators would have to constantly be turning inward while they think they're going straight. Must be the same force what stops us from falling off the edge.

Voliva's idea was that the North Pole was the centre of the earth, and the edge was hidden by a huge wall of ice (Antarctica to the rest of us).

[Exez]

So to sail the perimeter of that south barrier would be much longer than the perimeter of the north pole