Yes, Medieval people thought the Earth was flat
by mujhe-sona-hai
Yes, Medieval people thought the Earth was flat
by mujhe-sona-hai
23 Comments
30% at best but details, I mean I also imagine when people say that we knew the Earth was round they mean there was knowledge of it in major civilizations’ scholars (besides Chinese of course, though they’re also a little complicated, I’ve heard that their astronomy essentially already presumed that roundness but cartography was doing their own thing)
Strange the Chinese never figured it out, they had pretty advanced astronomy as far as I’m aware.
I wonder why people make fun of civilians that thought earth was flat … like imagine you suddenly teleport to an unknown place, under you is ground and when you look up the above space, you can’t tell where it’s end . This is what it’s was for ancient people the modern concept of plants, star and what we understand today was completely.
Medieval describes an epoch in Europe (sometimes arab countries too), not in East Asia
Do we even know what large amounts of people thought? Imo sailors and people living near the sea must have realised that the world is at least curved.
Just not all of them. And definitely not the people of 15th century Spain.
India+MENA+Europe sounds like a larger percentage of the worlds population than just China
This may be true, but the “medieval people thought the earth was flat” is generally used as a gotcha against the church, acting like there was some kind of obscurantist “dark millenium” between 500 and 1500 in europe where the catholic church made science™ illegal.
Saying it’s technically true doesn’t make it less completely wrong in the context where it’s generally used.
The general public in almost everywhere in the world, started learning about this fact only recently. Discoveries like these were not very easily disseminated to the public primarily because of lower general literacy. At least for India, I can vouch that Aryabhatta had commented that Earth was round. Indian astronomy was influenced by Greek ideas and Earth being round might have been an established idea in the academic circles at least.
I don’t think you can really make the claim that it’s 40% of the population or that entire regions of the world “Couldn’t figure it out” when it may have been something that just wasn’t very important to them or had the evidence of their knowledge destroyed (as with the indigenous americans in a lot of cases).
You doubly can’t make that claim because I can very much assure you not all of China’s population believed one way or another, and same with Europe, Arabia, and India. Not to mention that our population statistics for the time aren’t entirely accurate (they aren’t entirely accurate even today with modern technology).
There’s also probably a whole slew of people who thought the earth wasn’t even a sphere or flat.
Medieval people didn’t give a single fact about what earth looked like.
Those who actually cared knew it wasn’t flat and knew it was in space.
India, middle east, europe, so basically everywhere who had external relations
In the Southern Song and Jin dynasty China was in a peak period of population, but this meme implies a frustratingly common misunderstanding about the Chinese medieval period that pop growth was linear. By 1300 china’s population might have accounted for as little as 15% of estimated global population.
I just think the format of this meme is that the hooded character on the right is “enlightened” and should be aligned with modern scholarship
Bringing up medieval china in an eurocentric conversation about medieval europe is not necessarily an high IQ move but yeah I get the point
aplicar epoca medieval a un contexto universal cuando fue exclusivamente europeo es anacronista
Medieval refers to Europe though. Same with the “middle ages” – it makes no sense to refer to India and Chinese using these eras, as the period is usually between the fall of the western roman empire to the 1500s.
And even then the Chinese just believed they were the middle of the world and were surrounded by barbarians at the edges, rather than fearing falling off.
So yeah it’s eurocentric to say they didn’t believe the world was flat back then, but it also doesn’t make much sense to include other parts of the world.
“Medieval people thought the world was flat” Y’all medieval people were worried about living their lives, not dying of plague, praying peace lasts, and the taxes aren’t high. Does it really matter of they thought the world was flat? Would you care that much when you have more important shit to get done in your day to day? The fuck is a regular person gonna do in this time with this info? “Wow so the world is round? Really? Weird. Anyway, God I hope I don’t die of leprosy.”Cuz every time it is brought up, it’s just to make people feel better about themselves about their own intelligence
I’ve never seen this claim that it was just the Chinese who thought the earth was flat?
> 張衡 (78-139)
> 《渾天儀注》云：「天如雞子，地如雞中黃，孤居於天內，天大而地小。天表裏有水，天地各乘氣而立，載水而行。周天三百六十五度四分度之一，又中分之，則半覆地上，半繞地下，故二十八宿半見半隱，天轉如車轂之運也。」
rough translation: the sky is like an egg, earth is like the yolk, within the sky. the sky is large the earth is small…….. (the rest dont really matter)
> quote from 《晉書》 (book of jin, written in 648 AD)
> 「渾天如雞子，天體圓如彈丸，地如雞中黃，孤居于內。」
translation: the whole sky (world) is like an egg, astronomical objects are round like beads, earth is like the yolk in an egg, in the middle alone.
> quote from 《全後漢文》 卷五十五 (written between 25-220 AD)
both quotes from an astronomy book written by 張衡, which is sadly lost in history.
I always thought it was silly the way people claim that just because some greek guy figured it out one time, that this means all people in the whole world knew about this for a fact.
nah bro, most people couldn’t read, most people didn’t even know that Syene was a place, much less where it was.
the vast, vast, vast majority of peoples. even in europe. would have likely assumed based on their own observations of existence, that the ground was a plane under the sky which was another plane.
the church knew the world was round, because the clerics were some of the few people in society that could read.
and why would any random medieval swedish farm hand care what some long dead greek dude said one time in egypt about some shadows.
brother they believed in all kinds of nonsense. and we still do.
Never forget that the Ancient Greeks actually went so much further that they calculated the earth’s axial tilt along with its circumference with about 1% error accuracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
I always find “people knew the earth was round” a bit questionable. Yeah, scientists and sailors knew. But did the average peasant have any knowledge of this? And if someone told them wouldn’t most of them have called bullshit on that fact?
What are you source that claim that no one In China knew about it? I highly doubt that no Chinese mathematician or astronomer figured out.