It should also be emphasized that, while we don’t have evidence that other cultures regarded the Earth as spherical, we also don’t have evidence that they didn’t. For most of the world’s cultures for most of history, we just don’t have any record at all of what they thought of such things.
? We do have cosmological models of various sorts from almost every culture that left any significant corpus of written and/or drawn records. Yes, that excludes the vast majority of the timeframe of human existence. But from the time that historical records began, including cosmogonic tales in traditional folklore and so on, there’s quite a lot of accumulated information about ancient worldviews.
And it strikes me as highly unlikely that significant numbers of prehistoric human societies would have had spherical-earth models that were later supplanted by flat-earth models.
And for a lot of people, it was - do you really conceive of travelling on a section of a sphere with a slight curvature when you think about what route to take driving somewhere? Local enough sections of large enough curves are, for practical purposes, flat. The average person who was not an astronomer or an oceangoing sailor had no reason to worry about it. What I think people are reading back into the ancient mind inappropriately is the notion that a round v. flat earth had spiritual or theological significance, or that ordinary people, even ordinary people who received upper class educations, had any exposure at all to science (or its ancient predecessors, as the notion of science as a field of study didn’t exist at the time) in the way that we teach current 3rd graders how we know that the world is a sphere. Spreading this knowledge to people in general wasn’t a priority in the Greek world and the Romans, even among the educated elite, had absolutely no use at all for anything that we would consider science beyond engineering knowledge with immediately obvious practical applications.
There are Greek myths that require or imply a flat Earth (e.g. Zeus determines the center of the world by releasing birds at both ends and seeing where they meet.) There were Greek astronomers who understood the Earth is round but practiced the Greco-Roman religion, for centuries. They could conceive of the notion that religious myths might be metaphorical, untrue, or open to interpretation. That’s not the exclusively modern idea we think it is. The idea that a “flat-earther” is synonymous with extreme right-wing, pig-ignorant forms of religion is an exclusively modern idea. It didn’t have that valence in 200 BC.
It’s entirely possible that an ancient Mayan may have understood that his myths weren’t an accurate description of the physical world, or reasoned the existence of a spherical Earth in the same way that the Greeks did. But, for the same reasons that this was less likely in that culture, there was no reason for that person to write down his ideas (and of course, if he was from any culture but the Mayans, there was no way for him to write down anything - another reason that any putative discoveries from the pre-Colombians are lost). It just didn’t matter to them.
I was quoting ScienceMadeFun.net (see the OP). If you want more info about that you will need to ask them.
Kimstu has already made the point, but while we may not have a record of what most cultures thought throughout history and prehistory, for those cultures that we do have a record of (and there are hundreds if not thousands), as far as I know none (prior to the Greeks) include a spherical Earth. Most cosmologies that I am aware of include a series of layers from an underworld, through a flat Earth, to the heavens.
Jews, Christians, and Buddhists all nominally subscribe to such theological notions now, which doesn’t prevent mainstream Jews, Christians, and Buddhists from being astronomers or geologists. In a distant past when the idea of being a “religious fundamentalist” who saw all sorts of spiritual and political significance in the shape of the Earth didn’t exist, it should have been all the more easy for a Greek or a Mayan to segregate his religious and scientific beliefs.
Hmmm, it seems to me that the evolution of the nature of human belief has gone more or less in the opposite direction: the idea of “segregating” or compartmentalizing one’s contradictory beliefs in different contexts is much more a modern than an ancient notion.
What was definitely widespread in pre-modern thought was the concept of esoteric knowledge creating a hierarchy of belief: there were the common ideas that everyone absorbed, and then there were successive levels of inside info or special enlightenment that refined or even revolutionized those ideas for the initiated.
There does seem to be some indication that, for instance, Sanskrit scientific writing from about the late first millennium CE considered round-earth cosmology to partake of this sort of advanced-knowledge character. Although AFAICT it wasn’t secret or “forbidden” knowledge: it simply wouldn’t have got any traction outside the realm of professional practitioners who really depended on such models to make predictions of celestial events.
That ScienceMadeFun.net sounds like the exact same kind of ignorant crap trying to prove “science” in the Old Testament or Quran or Hinduism
Slightly off topic:
I’m busy reading The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science by Seb Falk.
It is surprising just how sophisticated medieval astronomy was. And yes, a spherical earth was taken for granted, and the size known pretty accurately.
It’s also interesting just how much interchange there was with the Muslim world, even before the Crusades, and how many Greek texts found their way to the West long before the fall of Constantinople.
If a writer was Muslim or Jewish, it made little or no difference to the reception of technical texts by Christian monks, and in universities in the west. Knowledge spread around Europe rapidly, and scholars travelled widely. Also the rate of development and the constant, ongoing growth of knowledge and technology was a lot more than you might imagine.
I certainly didn’t know that Eilmer of Malmesbury flew a glider for more than two hundred yards in the 11th century (and broke both legs in landing). Or that Roger Bacon wrote - 200 years before Leonardo - about a flying machine, 'in which a man may sit turning some kind of engine, so that artificial wings beat the air like a bird. I have never seen one, but I know a wise man who has designed one.’
The book is highly readable, but historically rigorous, with extensive cites and footnotes. The author has detailed, wide-ranging knowledge of his subject, and carefully avoids straying from the facts we know.
Highly recommended.
Not picking on you, but this was just a very succinct summary of points made by several folks:
Agree completely about the layers.
But is it necessarily layers of flat things, like filo dough? Or could they have been concentric layers of sorta spherical things?
For that matter, given all the challenges of understanding ancient texts given the highly fragmentary modern knowledge of those languages and the highly unstandardized nature of vocabulary and writing in ancient times, how confident can any scholar be of the fully nuanced meaning of the word they think connotes “planar”?
We moderns use the word “flat” in lots of contexts that are far from planar.
I don’t know enough to have an opinion. So I’m not disagreeing, simply asking.
I’m not aware of any (pre-Greek) cosmology that pictures the surface of the Earth as being other than flat (aside from mountains, etc.). The heavens may have been thought of as a dome, or a series of domes. After all, it appears that the sun and moon rise up, cross the sky above us, and then descend. And they block out the stars when they pass in front of them, so a series of curved layers is natural.
Here’s an image depicting a common cosmology, with a flat Earth, an underworld, and a dome of heavens above.
Certainly in medieval times that was the case.
Concentric spherical layers was definitely part of standard medieval cosmology for educated elites in every learned tradition that adopted Hellenistic spherical astronomy, although it’s not clear how far that model percolated through other parts of those medieval societies.
(Coincidentally, am just off to a Zoom “seminar” that Seb Falk might be attending, will mention your commendation of his excellent book! 
)
There’s a Native American culture for which the sum total of what we know about their knowledge of astronomy is a single petroglyph depicting a hand, a star, and a crescent. Archaeoastronomers can’t even agree on whether the star represents Venus or a supernova, or even if it represents any specific object at all. We have no hope of even guessing, with such scant information, what such a culture thought about the shape of the Earth. And there are plenty of societies for which we know even less.
And there are hundreds for which we know quite a lot. As far as I know, none of them envision a spherical Earth, and the ones of which I am aware (and I have done considerable reading on the subject) think in terms of a layered universe. The cultures with the most advanced understanding of astronomy such as the Mayans depicted the cosmos as layered. There’s no more reason to suppose that unknown Native American cultures imagined a spherical Earth than that they thought it was pyramidal or donut-shaped.
As @LSLGuy already pointed out, “layered” and “round” are orthogonal concepts. One can be one, or the other, or both, or neither. Saying that most cultures’ cosmologies are layered, not round, is like saying that stop signs are red, not octagons.
I didn’t say “round,” I said spherical. However you want to nitpick the terms, the layered view of the cosmos in most Native American cosmologies is fundamentally different from the spherical view of the Greeks and of modern science.
In the layered view, the Earth itself is flat. The perimeter is often seen as being square, although I suppose some might see it as round.
Yup. This issue is important, ISTM, because we shouldn’t try to project our modern notions of what qualifies as being “right” or “smart” or “scientific” back onto the observational acuity and intuition of ancient peoples.
In the ancient world, unless you had some pretty major technical reasons for needing to exploit the particular geometric properties of spherical astronomical models to make quantitative predictions, there was not much of a case to be made for trying to contradict all the constantly reinforced directly observed evidence for the extremely obvious general flatness of the earth you were on.
It’s a truism that “common sense is what tells us the earth is flat”, which is usually used as a criticism of the reliability of “common sense”. But it’s actually also a very reasonable point about the plausibility of straightforward “common-sense” inferences from self-evident facts. To the normal human eye and mind, the earth simply does not seem to be spherical, unless you focus very strongly on comparatively subtle phenomena that mostly manifest on distant horizons where observations tend to be more uncertain anyway.
Actually we have a pretty good chance of making quite a good guess at it. Given that all the other human cultures whose cosmological views we have any evidence for maintained (with some very specific and historically contingent exceptions) that the earth was flat, it is highly reasonable to guess that more obscure cultures held similar views.
Just as all ancient cultures (as far as we know) successfully deduced from ordinary observation that the heavens went round the earth, and that the position of the sun on the horizon when rising or setting correlated with change in the seasons, and that changing seasons and solar positions formed a cycle that amounted roughly to about twelve or thirteen lunar cycles, all ancient cultures (as far as we know, with the abovementioned very specific exceptions) reasonably inferred from ordinary observation that the earth is flat.
If you want to hypothesize a bunch of completely speculative counterexamples on the basis of zero actual evidence, then from a historical standpoint you need a better reason for considering such counterexamples plausible than just a shruggy “well it might have been so, we have no way of knowing for sure”.
(Btw, no Seb at the seminar, sorry GreenWyvern. )
Remember, too, that earlier concepts of cosmology had no grounding in the idea that the same rules applied up there as down here. By Newton’s time, the general layout of the heavens was somewhat well described (except maybe “what are stars?”). The planets moved in specified orbits, as did the satellites of the planets. It was Newton who demonstrated mathematically that the same force which keeps us all grounded would also explain how giant spheres moved in space - that one simple physics explained both up there and down here and so logically, the same physics rules probably applied everywhere and space did not have a different set of operational rules.
That in itself was a major leap forward. Earlier cosmologies ascribed different operating principles to earth and heavens, and the latter were unknowable.
The polynesians were remarkable in that they did manage long distance navigation, from about 1500 years ago, so not so ancient - starting (and returning) to very small islands without advanced navigation tools. A lot had to do with reading ocean currents, picking up on clues like type of birds to determine nearby land.
As for the Mayans and such, I think the greater point to make is how with long distance north-south travel the north pole point changes - which is the simplest evidence that the ground under you is curving. I guess the question then is - how much did the intelligentsia of Mayan, Aztec, or Incan empires travel north-south for long distances? The Incan Empire stretched quite a way north and south, but does not seem to have accrued the same astrological knowledge at least, known to us in current culture like with the Mayans.
I יhave a related question: about gravity.
For those smart cultures which did figure out that the earth is a sphere, did they ever ask themselves why the folks on the south side don’t fall off the sphere?
After all, it’s pretty obvious that things don’t stick to the bottom of solid objects.
Did anybody in ancient time ever ask this question?