It wasn’t until the fourth century BCE that Aristotle first proved that earth was, in fact, spherical. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth (to 0.5% accuracy!) in the third century BCE by measuring the heights of shadows in different parts of Egypt. The further away you got from it (closer to the edges of the earth) the more savage humans were. Herodotus also thought the earth was flat (though not circular) and that Greece was the centre of civilisation.

In 500 BCE Hekatæus drew a flat world map assuming that the earth was a flat circle with Greece right in the middle. The earliest known map of the world (or at least the earliest known map of the known world at the time) is a Babylonian map dating to 600 BCE.ĭevelopment of maps continued with the Ancient Greeks. Maps became common by the time of the Babylonians who used accurate surveying techniques to draw them. There are several cave paintings, some as old as 12000 BCE, that might represent maps. They help us orient ourselves and understand our surroundings. When in fact, as humans have known for a very long time, at least since the time of ancient Greeks, that the earth is spherical (that people thought that the earth was flat at the time of Columbus is a myth). Well, not exactly spherical, the earth is an oblate spheroid: a sphere slightly squashed at the poles, but it’s definitely not flat like a pancake. They all start with the same big lie, that the earth is flat, two-dimensional, like a pancake.

The big map in your high school classroom, the atlas you’ve used to navigate during a road trip and even google maps are all lying to you. Is Greenland really bigger than Africa and Australia?

Ancient map of flat earth