page_title: Myth of the flat Earth
hierarchical_section_title: Myth of the flat Earth
caption_attribution_description: English: The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist that first appeared in Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888). The image depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky, depicted as if it were a solid hemisphere, to look at the mysterious Empyrean beyond. The caption underneath the engraving (not shown here) translates to "A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet..."
context_page_description: The myth of the flat Earth is a modern misconception that European scholars and educated people during the Middle Ages believed the Earth to be flat rather than spherical.
  The earliest documentation of a spherical Earth comes from the ancient Greeks. Since the 600s AD, scholars have supported that view, and by the Early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint.
  Since the 1400s, belief in a flat Earth among educated Europeans was almost nonexistent. This despite fanciful depictions in art, such as the exterior panels of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which a disc-shaped Earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere.
  According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of 'flat Earth darkness' among scholars, regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now. Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology."
context_section_description: The myth of the flat Earth is a modern misconception that European scholars and educated people during the Middle Ages believed the Earth to be flat rather than spherical.
  The earliest documentation of a spherical Earth comes from the ancient Greeks (5th century BC). Since the 600s AD, scholars have supported that view, and by the Early Middle Ages (700–1500 AD), virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint.
  Since the 1400s, belief in a flat Earth among educated Europeans was almost nonexistent. This despite fanciful depictions in art, such as the exterior panels of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which a disc-shaped Earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere.
  According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of 'flat Earth darkness' among scholars, regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now. Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology." Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".
  Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat-Earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over biological evolution. Russell claims "with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat", and ascribes popularization of the flat-Earth myth to histories by John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, and Washington Irving.
caption: The famous "Flat Earth" Flammarion engraving originates with Flammarion's 1888 L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (p. 163)
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