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Literally from the article: > Despite a persistent legend, neither Columbus nor his Spanish patrons thought Earth was a finite plane instead of a round planet.
by eesmith 4y ago
Literally from the article:
> Despite a persistent legend, neither Columbus nor his Spanish patrons thought Earth was a finite plane instead of a round planet. And you can blame one of the United States’ greatest authors for creating a myth that still surrounds one of history’s best-known figures ...
> It’s almost certain that in the 1490s, nobody thought the earth was flat. According to historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, “no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat.”
- hef19898 4y agoFor those going to sea, or living on coast lines, itvwas clear the earth was round. For everyone else it didn't really matter either way.
- eesmith 4y agoI don't think it's that simple. Pre-Socratic Greeks, like Xenophanes, lived on the coast and went to sea, but thought the world was flat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophanes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophanes Until 1600s or so, Chinese people thought the world was flat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#East_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#East_Asia , even though many Chinese people lived on the coast and sailed the seas.