The concept of a spherical Earth displaced earlier beliefs in a flat Earth: In early Mesopotamian mythology, the world was portrayed as a disk floating in the ocean with a hemispherical sky-dome above, and this forms the premise for early world maps like those of Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus. A practical demonstration of Earth's sphericity was achieved by Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastián Elcano's circumnavigation (1519–1522). ![]() This knowledge was gradually adopted throughout the Old World during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the 3rd century BC, Hellenistic astronomy established the roughly spherical shape of Earth as a physical fact and calculated the Earth's circumference. The earliest documented mention of the concept dates from around the 5th century BC, when it appears in the writings of Greek philosophers. ![]() Spherical Earth or Earth's curvature refers to the approximation of figure of the Earth as a sphere. Image from space: The curved surface of the spherical planet Earth Medieval artistic representation of a spherical Earth – with compartments representing earth, air, and water (c.
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