Before you ask, no I didn’t have any encounters with people who claimed Earth was flat. I’m just curious.
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It was known at different times in different places. In the ancient near east, the world was thought to be flat. The ancient Greeks clearly knew it was round, going back even before Eratosthenes who did a good job estimating its size. The first mention comes from about 500 BC. India seems to have adopted the “spherical earth” model (thought they might have got it from Greece), but China did not until European contact became extensive.
So why did Greece get it so early and some other countries get it quite late? I’d suggest it was because Greek philosophers were quite obsessed with geometry and also relatively likely to sail around a lot. The spherical nature of the earth is easier to pick up if you are sailing around a lot and seeing different stars at different latitudes or the tips of islands appear first, and it’s easier to know what that means if you have an understanding of geometry.
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