Now we all know that the earth is an irregular ellipsoid, but in ancient times, human activities were very limited. People everywhere think that their place is the center of the world, and they express the world through what they see and imagine, so there are all kinds of strange stories and myths and legends about the shape of the earth.
Ancient India's imagination of the earth was deeply influenced by Buddhism. Elephants and turtles are very meaningful animals in Buddhism, so people in ancient India imagined that the earth was a round disk, carried by four elephants, and the elephants stood on a huge turtle.
The ancient Egyptians had several different "creation myths", but one of the mainstream worldviews was to imagine heaven and earth as a big box, with the earth as the body of Sibu, the male god, and the sky as the elegant goddess Benjamin Luthi. At the beginning of creation, Sibu held high the goddess, and their bodies became various elements in the earth and the sky. This is similar to our Kuafu.
The earth imagined by Babylon was a flat disk upside down, surrounded by water, and a semicircular dome covered the water. Archaeologists found fragments of maps made of clay by ancient Babylonians in 2800 BC, and described this model of the universe.
In China, we also have an ancient theory of "covering the sky". People think that the earth is a square like a chessboard, with sea water outside, and the sky covers the ground like a semi-circular bowl.
Generally speaking, if the cuneiform characters created by Sumerians in 3200 BC are taken as the starting point of human civilization,
Then in the next 2700 years, our ancestors had various assumptions about the shape of the earth, but they all had one thing in common, that is, they thought that human beings had been living on a flat land!
It was not until 500 BC that someone finally began to sing the opposite of "horizon theory".
A man named Pythagoras discovered the golden ratio and Pythagoras theorem. He believes that the world is the masterpiece of the creator, and everything in nature is composed of all kinds of perfect geometric figures and numbers. The hemisphere is not perfect, so he infers that the earth should be spherical!
Although there is no evidence, Pythagoras was a famous scholar at that time, and his words still had some influence. So everyone silently thought, "Is the earth really a ball?"
100 years later, a man named Aristotle finally "helped" him find the corresponding evidence. This Aristotle is also a big shot.
He said, when we usually see sailboats at sea go away, we always see the hull disappear first, and then the mast and sail disappear. If the earth is flat, the hull, mast and sail should be reduced to one point at the same time, and then hours.
Conversely, when the sailboat comes to you, we also see the mast and sail first, and then the whole hull. This phenomenon is unreasonable if the earth is flat, but it can be well explained if the earth is spherical.
He also said that at night, if we keep walking in the direction of Polaris, we will find that some stars behind us slowly disappear on the horizon, while some new stars will rise in the starry sky ahead. This phenomenon also shows that the earth is spherical.
Finally, Aristotle also said that during the solar eclipse, the shadow of the earth on the moon is an arc. If the earth is flat, the shadow on the moon should not be this shape, so it can be inferred that the earth is spherical.
Aristotle's "theory of the circle of the earth" is well founded, but many people still can't accept this view, because if the earth is really spherical, why don't we "fall" head down and feet up when walking?
At that time, intellectuals who supported the theory that the earth was round were often asked this question and could only say: I don't know, but you'd better not go too far.
On the map of ancient Greece, the position of the Strait of Gibraltar from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean will be painted with the giant Antai in Greek mythology. The warning sign raised in his left hand said, "Stop here and don't go any further."
Because at that time, both the ancient Greeks who supported the theory that the earth was round and the ancient Greeks who supported the theory of horizon believed that when a ship reached the Atlantic Ocean, it would fall into the bottomless abyss with the seawater.
Aristotle naturally has no answer to this question, so the statement that the earth is round can only be regarded as speculation. It was not until 1522 that the Portuguese navigator Magellan's Victoria successfully returned to Hong Kong and completed her first voyage around the world, and the fact that the earth was spherical was confirmed.
It was not until Newton, a genius scientist, discovered gravity that people finally understood why the earth is round, but people don't fall when they walk, and why the sea on the other side of the earth doesn't fall into the sky. At this time, all the phenomena that the earth is round were really satisfactorily explained.
Aristotle's "theory of the circle of the earth" is not perfect, but he is the first person to demonstrate the shape of the earth by "telling evidence". His way of thinking opened the door to empirical science and played an important role in Ptolemy's later establishment of the geocentric model that ruled astronomy 1000 years.