Evidence That The Earth Is Round?!

[Barquentine]

How come ancient peoples (like the Greeks' Ptolemaic system) could
not see the Earth is round? The Moon is round, so is the Sun, and they could have seen other planets are round, but how did they explain what the curved shaped shadow was on the Moon which they correctly guessed was
going round the Earth?

[Zacs-Master]

Ptolemy believed the planets were a set of nested SPHERES. nothing to do with believing it was flat.

[jno]

you can see the sun is circular, but you can't tell that it's globular; you think you can only see two dimensions. As far as I know, the Earth was believed to be round too, but like a plate, not a ball.

[Buenchico]

Pythagoras postulated that the Earth is round in about 500BCE. However there's a line in Homer's Odyssey which suggests that seafarers had known the Earth was a globe for at least two or three centuries prior to that.

Plato (around 400BCE) not only assumed that it was round (as did nearly all Greek scholars) but put forward an estimate for its circumference.

His student, Aristotle, went a long way to proving that the Earth is round

Archimedes, around 250BCE, improved upon Plato's estimate for the size of the Earth.

Eratosthenes (around 200BCE) put forward a theoretical experiment to find the Earth's size. If it had actually been carried out the result would have had an error of less than a half of one per cent.

Indian scholars were able to calculate the size of the Earth to even greater accuracy by around 500CE.

Islamic astronomy assumed from its outset that the Earth is round (based upon what their scholars had learnt from the Greeks).

Even in the Middle Ages (when history books have often taught that most people believed in a flat Earth) nearly all scholars accepted that the Earth was round. The idea that the Catholic Church insisted that the Earth was flat seems to have derived from the falsehoods put about by anti-Catholic Protestant propaganda in the 17th century and has nothing to do with reality.

[nailit]

And to think that the Flat Earth Society now has members all around the globe....

[Buenchico]

^^^ Surely, they can't be "all around the globe", can they? Wouldn't "all across the plate" be better?

[Mamyalynne]

....all four corners of it ;-)

[maggiebee]

We all know the earth is flat don't we? Terry Pratchet told us so!

[mibn2cweus]

There are countless 'reasons' to believe in countless 'things' that are not at all what they might seem . . . until you have acquired the necessary knowledge essential to determining what actually is real.

[jim360]

The basic answer, as hinted at by Buenchico, is that they *did* know it was round, overwhelmingly so (possibly with the exception of ancient China). The concept of a flat Earth has then always been around but only ever as a minority idea, and any notion that the prevailing view in most of the world was that it was flat is wrong.

[mibn2cweus]

Within the realm of most ancient peoples daily experience the Earth is relatively flat . . . albeit rather bumpy.