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Who first discovered that the world is round?


Who discovered the world is round? When did they discover it?

5156 day(s) ago

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mazerati
Some sidenotes here.. as far as the Isaiah 40.22 and 'God sitting above the circle of the earth', in the original Hebrew (Hebrew language is a bit uncompatible with English) the word translated as 'circle' comes from a old root 'khaga' meaning to 'revolve' which is interesting, as the first half of the verse could be really saying 'God sits above the revolving earth'.
there is however another verse about earth being round. Job 26.10 says, in best translation, 'He (God) drew a circle around the face of the waters and set the boundary of light and darkness'.

there are many fragments of the Scriptures which seem unreasonable to us, but it may be not because we are so smart but because we are not smart enough. one example is the story of Jonah who was swallowed by a whale before changing his mind to obey God telling him to go to Niniveh to preach repentance. the scientists now say it is possible to be swallowed by certain species of whales and survive.
the Red Sea which the Bible says split her waters for the Israelites to pass through is another example. those waters seperate naturally at certain times and one can walk in between them and never wet his feet. the miracle of the splitting waters may not lay in the fact that they split but in the fact that the Israelites were there at the very specific time of the splitting and crossed over safely just before facing certain death from either the waters or the Pharaoh's army from the other direction.



Posted 4402 day ago

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seekyetruth
Actually, the Bible told people the world was round in the book of Job which Biblical scholars believe may have been written about 1500 BC. Job 26:10 reads: "He hath compassed the waters with bounds, until the day and night come to an end." Newer translations say it this way: "He drew a circular horizon on the face of the waters, at the boundary of light and darkness" (NKJV); "He has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness" (ESV). I mainly just refer to the old KJV myself, as I believe its translation to be the most pure, but I used the others as examples here to show that scholars knew the meaning of the original Greek words translated as "compassed" in Job 26:10. Two words were used, "chug" which means "to encircle, encompass, describe a circle, draw round, make a circle", and "al" which means "above, over, upon, or against". Clearly, the meaning is that God drew a circular boundary above the waters of the earth. Anyone with access to the early scriptures could have had a notion that the earth was round.

Posted 4507 day ago

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BobToday
According to American mythology, Christopher Columbus discovered the Earth was round when he set sail for Asia in 1492 by travelling west instead of the long, easterly route that was already known. When Columbus hit land, he thought he was in India and called the native peoples Indians. Although the myth of Columbus discovering the spherical nature of the Earth is taught to school children in the U.S. as fact, it is not true.

In the beginning of the history of humankind, it is true that the prevailing theory of the universe included a flat Earth around which the sun, moon, and stars all revolved. In China, this theory persisted until the late 17th century when Europeans brought knowledge of the spherical model to them. However, the ancient Greeks began to assert that the Earth is spherical as far back as 570 BC when Pythagoras made the hypothesis. Pythagoras was never able to prove the spherical model of the Earth, but he was so influential that after his death, no record of any Greeks believing in a flat Earth exists. In the centuries that followed, other influential Greek teachers and scholars taught that the Earth is a sphere. After studying Pythagorean mathematics, Plato taught all of his students the spherical model. Aristotle, a student of Plato, reasoned that the Earth must be curved because in Egypt, stars can be seen that are not present in Greece. He also argued that the shadow of the Earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse is round and the stars rise higher in the sky as travelers move south.

In 240 BC, Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician accurately estimated the circumference of the Earth, using trigonometry, with only a 5 - 10 percent margin of error . In 150 BC, Ptolemy published his eight-volume compendium, Geographia. This early encyclopedia and atlas showed the earth as spherical, and Ptolemy also gave the Earth latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates.

Through the dark ages, most people with access to schooling had held on to the belief in the spherical Earth. Columbus had been taught this at an early age and he used Ptolemy’s Geographia for the calculations for his trip in 1492. In 1522, explorer Ferdinand Magellan finally provided first-hand proof by being the first person to sail completely around the Earth.


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