Scientific facts 👨🔧👩🔧
This article is about the misconception that medieval scholars believed in a flat Earth. For actual flat Earth cosmologies, see Flat Earth. The famous "Flat Earth" Flammarion engraving originates with Flammarion's 1888 L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (p. 163) 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 . [1][2][3] The earliest documentation of a spherical Earth comes from the ancient Greeks ( 5th century BC ). [4][5] Since the 600s AD , [6] 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 ...