Many ancient culture including Greece, Near East, India, and China had believed in the context of a Flat Earth. This idea was widely accepted in most of the pre-scientific societies. This paper intends to discuss the history of the hypothesis: the belief of different ancient and pre-scientific communities of what the Earth looks like and the arguments of different historians, philosophers, and poets of the assumption of the flat Earth. This paper also intends to put in the picture the journey of knowing the spherical Earth, widely accepted at the present time. The Historical Development Mesopotamians believed that the world was a flat disk floating in the ocean. The same idea was found in the Hometic account of the 8th century BC in which the “Okeanos, the personified body of water surrounding the circular surface of the Earth, is the begetter of all life and possibly all gods.”1 To the Jews, the biblical earth was a flat disk floating on water. The ancient Egyptians, through their Pyramid and Coffin texts, believed that the ocean (Nun) was a flat, circular body surrounding many islands, and therefore conceived the similar ancient Near Eastern circular earth cosmography around water. …show more content…
Homer and Hesiod, both Mediterranean poets, described a flat earth cosmography. The ‘earth disk’ also appears in Stasinus of Cyprus, Mimmermus, Aristophanes, and Apollonius Rhodius. Several pre-Socratic philosophers also believed in the flat earth: Democritus (460-370 BC), Leucippus (440 BC), and Thales who thought the earth was like a log floating on