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adaptation of a T-O Map . This kind of medieval Mappa Mundi illustrate only the reachable side of a Round Earth , since it was thought that no one could cross a Torrid Clime near the Equator to the other half of the globe.]] The idea of a flat Earth is that the inhabited surface of Earth is flat, rather than a Curved Spherical Earth . This idea was shown to be incorrect many centuries ago, and the term "flat earther" is sometimes used colloquially to describe those who cling to discredited ideas. Because of this usage, the impression given by the statement above is that early peoples were in some way unintelligent. This was not the case. It is most likely that the vast majority of common people did not care about the shape of the earth, and treated it locally as flat, in exactly the same way as we do today. Philosophers who considered the issue had to reconcile the apparent spherical nature of the globe (which can easily be deduced from a study of the horizon) with the fact that objects do not fall off it. The possible answer that all things are attracted to the centre of the earth results in a Geocentric universe), which has problems describing Siderial motions. It was to address these difficult issues that some theories proposed either a flat or hemispherical earth, and complex motions for heavenly bodies, such as Ptolemy 's Epicycles . Eventually Newton developed our current theory of Universal Gravitation , but the earlier proposals were not unsophisticated. It is also important to consider in what sense the earth is considered flat. Since discussion of the Universe brings Theology into consideration, medieval flat earth statements may often be referring to theoretical relationships between God and Man rather than physical reality. Such considerations explain the violent disagreements between individual philosophers and state/religious establishment, over what would nowadays be considered a minor issue. ANTIQUITY Belief in a flat Earth is found in mankind's oldest writings. In early Mesopotamian Thought , the world was portrayed as a flat disk floating in the ocean, and this forms the premise for early Greek maps like those of Anaximander and Hecataeus Of Miletus . Some theologians and biblical researchers maintain that writers of the alludes to the earth being circular (Isaiah 40:22). Isaiah 40:22 (NIV) "He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in." IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY In early Classical Antiquity , the Earth was generally believed to be flat. According to Aristotle , Presocratic philosophers, including Leucippus (c. 440 BCE) and , believed the Earth to be a short cylinder with a flat, circular top which remained stable because it is the same distance from all things;.Anaximander, ''Fragments and Commentary'', Arthur Fairbanks, ed. and trans., (Plut., ''Strom.'' 2 ; ''Dox''. 579); cited from the Hanover Historical Texts Project. {Link without Title} By s rise higher above the horizon. This is only possible if their horizon is at an angle to northerners' horizon. Thus the Earth's surface cannot be flat.Aristotle, ''De caelo'', 297b24-31 Also, the border of the shadow of Earth on the Moon during the partial phase of a Lunar Eclipse is always circular, no matter how high the Moon is over the horizon. Only a sphere casts a circular shadow in every direction, whereas a circular disk casts an Elliptical shadow in most directions.Aristotle, ''De caelo'', 297b31-298a10 The Earth's , his result is within a margin of between 2% and 20% of the actual circumference, 40,008 kilometres. Note that Eratosthenes could only measure the Circumference of the Earth by assuming that the distance to the Sun is so great that the Ray s of sunlight are essentially Parallel . A similar measurement, reported in a Chinese mathematical treatise, the ''Zhoubi suanjing'' (1st c. BC), was used to measure the distance to the Sun– albeit by assuming that the Earth was flat.G. E. R. Lloyd, ''Adversaries and Authorities: Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science'', (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1996), pp. 59-60. '', showing the inhabited northern region separated from the antipodes by an imagined ocean spanning the equator.]] During this period, Earth was generally thought of as divided into Zones Of Climate , with a ''frigid clime'' at the Poles , a deadly ''torrid clime'' near the Equator , and a mild and habitable ''temperate clime'' between the two. It was thought that the different temperatures of these zones were related with proximity to the sun. It was erroneously believed that no one could cross the torrid clime and reach the unknown lands on the other half of the globe. At the time, these imagined lands as well as their inhabitants were both called Antipodes .Alfred Hiatt, "Blank Spaces on the Earth," ''The Yale Journal of Criticism'', 15, (2002): 223–250; Michael Livingston, Modern Medieval Map Myths: The Flat World, Ancient Sea-Kings, and Dragons , 2002. Lucretius (1st. c. BC) opposed the concept of a spherical Earth, because he considered the idea of Antipodes absurd. But by the 1st century AD, Pliny The Elder was in a position to claim that everyone agrees on the spherical shape of Earth ('' Natural History '', 2.64), although there continued to be disputes regarding the nature of the antipodes, and how it is possible to keep the Ocean in a curved shape. Interestingly, Pliny as an "intermediate" theory considers also the possibility of an imperfect sphere, "shaped like a Pinecone ". (''Natural History'', 2.65) In the Second century the Alexandrian astronomer derived his maps from a curved globe and developed the system of Latitude , Longitude , and Clime s. His writings remained the basis of European Astronomy throughout the Middle Ages , although Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ca. 3rd to 7th centuries) saw occasional arguments in favor of a flat Earth. In late antiquity such widely read encyclopedists as '' Dream Of Scipio '', Macrobius described the Earth as a globe of insignificant size in comparison to the remainder of the cosmos.Macrobius, ''Commentary on the Dream of Scipio'', transl. W. H. Stahl, (New York: Columbia Univ. Pr., 1952), chaps. v-vii, (pp. 200-212). IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH From were difficult to reconcile with the Christian view of a unified human race descended from one couple and redeemed by a single Christ. Saint Augustine (354–430) argued against assuming people inhabited the antipodes: But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part which is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled. ''De Civitate Dei'', Book XVI, Chapter 9 — ''Whether We are to Believe in the Antipodes'' , translated by Rev. Marcus Dods , D.D.; from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin College Since these people would have to be descended from Adam , they would have had to travel to the other side of the Earth at some point; Augustine continues: It is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man. Scholars of Augustine's work have traditionally assumed that he would have shared the common view of his educated contemporaries that the earth is spherical. That assumption has recently been challenged, however.''Cosmography'', in ''Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia'', William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids MI, 1999, p.246Leo Ferrari, ''Augustine's Cosmography, Augustinian Studies'', 27:2 (1996), 129-177. Ferrari undertook a detailed analysis of Augustine's references to the physical features of the universe and concluded that he viewed the earth as an essentially flat disc surrounded by a vast ocean. A few Christian authors directly opposed the round Earth. Lactantius (245–325), after his conversion to Christianity became a trenchant critic of all pagan philosophy. In Book III of ''The Divine Institutes''Lactantius, ''The Divine Institutes'', Book III {Link without Title} , Chapter XXIV, ''THE ANTE-NICENE FATHERS'', Vol VII, ed. Rev. Alexander Roberts, D.D., and James Donaldson, LL.D., American reprint of the Edinburgh edition (1979), W.B.Eerdmans Publishing Co.,Grand Rapids, MI, pp.94-95. he ridicules the notion that there could be inhabitants of the antipodes "whose footsteps are higher than their heads". After presenting some arguments which he claims advocates for a spherical heaven and earth had advanced to support their views, he writes:
In his ''Homilies Concerning the Statutes''St. John Chrysostom, ''Homilies Concerning the Statutes'', Homily IX {Link without Title} , paras.7-8, in ''A SELECT LIBRARY OF THE NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH'', Series I, Vol IX, ed. Philip Schaff, D.D.,LL.D., American reprint of the Edinburgh edition (1978), W.B.Eerdmans Publishing Co.,Grand Rapids, MI, pp.403-404. St. (547) in his ''Topographia Christiana'', where the Covenant Ark was meant to represent the whole universe, argued on theological grounds that the Earth was flat, a Parallelogram enclosed by four oceans. At least one early Christian writer, Basil Of Caesarea (329–379), believed the matter to be theologically irrelevant.Saint Basil the Great, ''Hexaemeron'' 9 - HOMILY IX - "The creation of terrestrial animals", Holy Inocents Orthodox Church. {Link without Title} Different historians have maintained that these advocates of the flat Earth were either influential (a view typified by Andrew Dickson White ) or relatively unimportant (typified by Jeffrey Burton Russell1) in the later Middle Ages. The scarcity of references to their beliefs in later medieval writings convinces most of today's historians that their influence was slight. IN THE MIDDLE AGES Early Medieval Europe Macrobian cosmic diagram showing the ''sphere of the Earth'' at the center, (''globus terrae'').]] T-O Map representing the inhabitated world as described by Isidore Of Seville in his '' Etymologiae ''. (chapter 14, ''de terra et partibus'').]] With the end of Roman civilization, showing the Ptolemaic climates derived from the concept of a spherical Earth and a diagram showing the Earth (labeled as ''globus terrae'', the sphere of the Earth) at the center of the hierarchically ordered planetary spheres.B. Eastwood and G. Graßhoff, ''Planetary Diagrams for Roman Astronomy in Medieval Europe, ca. 800-1500'', ''Transactions of the American Philosophical Society'', 94, 3 (Philadelphia, 2004), pp. 49-50. Images of some of these features can be found in Dream Of Scipio . Europe's view of the shape of the Earth in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages may be best expressed by the writings of early Christian scholars:
A non-literary but graphic indication that people in the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was a sphere, is the use of the orb ( Globus Cruciger ) in the regalia of many kingdoms and of the Holy Roman Empire. It is attested from the time of the Christian late-Roman emperor Theodosius II ( 423 ) throughout the Middle Ages; the ''Reichsapfel'' was used in 1191 at the coronation of Emperor Henry VI . A recent study of medieval concepts of the sphericity of the Earth noted that "since the eighth century, no cosmographer worthy of note has called into question the sphericity of the Earth."Klaus Anselm Vogel, "''Sphaera terrae'' - das mittelalterliche Bild der Erde und die kosmographische Revolution," PhD dissertation Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, 1995, p. 19. {Link without Title} Of course it was probably not the few noted intellectuals who defined public opinion. It is difficult to tell what the wider population may have thought of the shape of the Earth – if they considered the question at all. It may have been as irrelevant to them as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is to most of our contemporaries. The modern misconception that people of the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat first entered the popular imagination in the nineteenth century, thanks largely to the publication of Washington Irving 's fantasy ''The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus'' in 1828. Islamic World Around 830 CE, Caliph Al-Ma'mun commissioned a group of astronomers to measure the distance from Tadmur ( Palmyra ) to Al-Raqqah , in modern Syria. They found the cities to be separated by one degree of latitude and the distance between them to be 66 2/3 miles and thus calculated the Earth's circumference to be 24,000 miles.''Gharā'ib al-funūn wa-mulah al-`uyūn'' (The Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes), 2.1 "On the mensuration of the Earth and its division into seven climes, as related by Ptolemy and others," (ff. 22b-23a) {Link without Title} Many Muslim scholars declared a mutual agreement (, and Abul-Faraj Ibn Al-Jawzi have said that the Muslim scholars are in agreement that all celestial bodies are round. Ibn Taymiyah also remarked that Allah has said, "And He (Allah) it is Who created the night and the day, the sun and the moon. They float, each in a Falak." Ibn Abbas says, "A Falaka like that of a spinning wheel." The word 'Falak' (in the Arabic Language ) means "that which is round. ''History, Science and Civilization: Early Muslim Consensus: The Earth is Round'' . 2 (In Arabic.) The Muslim scholars who held to the round earth theory used it in an impeccably Islamic manner, to calculate the distance and direction from any given point on the earth to (d. 1406), in his Muqaddimah , also identified the world as spherical. The later belief of Muslim scholars, like Suyuti (d. 1505) that the earth is flat represents a deviation from this earlier opinion . ''History, Science and Civilization: Early Muslim Consensus: The Earth is Round'' . Later Medieval Europe ''". The most influential Astronomy textbook of the 13th Century .]] By the 11th century, Europe had learned of Islamic Astronomy . Around 1070 started the Renaissance Of The 12th Century , featuring an intellectual revitalization of Europe with strong Philosophical and Scientific roots, and increased appetite for the study of nature. By then, abundant records suggest that any doubts that Europeans may have had in earlier times in regard to the spherical shape of the Earth were generally eliminated. ''", the most influential Astronomy textbook of the 13th Century and required reading by students in all Western European universities, described the world as a sphere. Thomas Aquinas , in his Summa Theologica , wrote, "The physicist proves the earth to be round by one means, the astronomer by another: for the latter proves this by means of mathematics, e.g. by the shapes of eclipses, or something of the sort; while the former proves it by means of physics, e.g. by the movement of heavy bodies towards the center, and so forth."3 The shape of the Earth was not only discussed in scholarly works written in Latin ; it was also treated in works written in Vernacular languages or dialects and intended for wider audiences. The Norwegian book Konungs Skuggsjá , from around 1250, states clearly that the Earth is round - and that it is night on the other side of the Earth when it is daytime in Norway. The author also discusses the existence of Antipodes - and he notes that they (if they exist) will see the Sun in the north of the middle of the day, and that they will have opposite seasons of the people living in the Northern Hemisphere. in a 14th century copy of '' L'Image Du Monde '' (ca. 1246).]]Dante's Divine Comedy , the last great work of Literature of the Middle Ages, written in Italian, portrays Earth as a Sphere . Also, the Elucidarium of Honorius Augustodunensis (c. 1120), an important manual for the instruction of lesser clergy which was translated into Middle English , Old French , Middle High German , Old Russian , Middle Dutch , Old Norse , Icelandic , Spanish , and several Italian dialects, explicitly refers to a spherical Earth. Likewise, the fact that Bertold Von Regensburg (mid-13th century) used the spherical Earth as a Sermon ic illustration shows that he could assume this knowledge among his congregation. The sermon was held in the vernacular German, and thus was not intended for a learned audience. Reinhard Krüger, a professor for Romance literature at the University of Stuttgart (Germany), has discovered more than 100 medieval Latin and vernacular writers from the late antiquity to the 15th century who were all convinced that the earth was round like a ball. However, as late as 1400s, the Spanish theologian exploration of Africa and Asia and Spanish explorations in the Americas in the 15th century and finally Ferdinand Magellan 's circumnavigation of the earth brought the experimental proofs for the global shape of the earth. ASIA India From antiquity, a cosmological view prevailed in India that held the Earth to consist of four continents grouped around the central mountain Meru like the petals of a flower; surrounding these continents was the outer ocean. This view was elaborated in traditional Buddhist Cosmology , which depicts the world as a vast, flat oceanic disk (of the magnitude of a small planetary system), bounded by mountains, in which the continents are set as small islands. In the center of this disk is the immense Mount Sumeru , the linchpin of the world, around which the stars, the Sun, and the Moon revolve; the change of day and night is caused by the occultation of the Sun by this mountain. This world is only one of an infinite number of similar worlds, which extend in all directions. During the , New York, ISBN 0-684-83718-8:
In fact the very beginning of the Hindu texts of the Bhaagavata mentions earth as the ‘BhooGola’- meaning the sphere of earth. The same spherical nature of earth has been mentioned several times throughout the text (especially in the Varaha avatar- boar form).45 China and the Far East In Ancient China , the prevailing belief was that the earth was flat and square, while the Heavens were round,Needham, Volume 3, 498. an assumption which remained dominant until the introduction of European astronomy in the 17th century.6Christopher Cullen, “Joseph Needham on Chinese Astronomy”, ''Past and Present'', No. 87. (May, 1980), pp. 39-53 (42 & 49) In the Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD) text of the ''Da Dai Li Ji'' (大戴禮記) (''Records of Ritual Matters by Dai Senior''), it quotes the earlier Zeng Shen (505 BC-436 BC) replying to a question of Shanchu Li , admitting that it was hard to conceptualize the orthodox Chinese view of the four corners of the earth and how they could be properly covered. According to the historian Needham , Zhang Heng (78-139 AD) theorized that the universe was in the oval shape of a hen's egg, while the earth itself was like the curved yolk within (in a geocentric model of thinking similar to Europe before Galileo). However, the English sinologist Cullen objects that In a passage of Zhang Heng's cosmogony not translated by Needham, Chang himself says: "Heaven takes its body from the Yang, so it is round and in motion. Earth takes its body from the Yin, so it is flat and quiescent". The point of the egg analogy is simply to stress that the earth is completely enclosed by heaven, rather than merely covered from above as the kai t'ien describes. Chinese astronomers, many of them brilliant men by any standards, continued to think in flat-earth terms until the seventeenth century; this surprising fact might be the starting-point for a re-examination of the apparent facility with which the idea of a spherical earth found acceptance in fifth-century B.C. Greece.Christopher Cullen, “Joseph Needham on Chinese Astronomy”, ''Past and Present'', No. 87. (May, 1980), pp. 39-53 (42) Yu Xi (c. 330 AD) influenced many Chinese thinkers afterwards when he expressed his own criticisms about the square and flat earth, while Li Ye wrote of similar ideas, arguing that the movements of the round heaven would be hindered by a square earth. Li Ye argued that it was spherical like the heavens, only much smaller, a belief that was shared by the followers of the Hun Tian theory. Shortly after the collapse of the Ming Dynasty , the ''Ge Chi Cao'' treatise of Xiong Ming-yu was written (1648 AD), and showed a printed picture of the earth as a spherical globe, with the text stating that "The Round Earth certainly has no Square Corners".Needham, Volume 3, 499. The text also pointed out that sailing ships could return to their port of origin after circumnavigating the waters of the earth. Xiong Ming-yu, in order to persuade the elite class of his time, harkened back to ideas of the Hun Tian theorists to defend his ideas, with the earth 'as round as a crossbow bullet' ('yuan ru dan wan'). However, the influence of the map is distinctly Western, as traditional maps of Chinese cartography held the graduation of the sphere at 365.25 degrees, while the Western graduation was of 360 degrees. Also of interest to note is on one side of the world, there is seen towering Chinese Pagoda s, while on the opposite side (upside-down) there were European Cathedral s. Western influence of geographical knowledge was used by Xiong to enforce what he believed had already been argued by earlier Chinese astronomers, something which the French sinologist Jean-Claude Martzloff regards as a retrospective interpretation: European astronomy was so much judged worth consideration that numerous Chinese authors developed the idea that the Chinese of antiquity had anticipated most of the novelties presented by the missionaries as European discoveries, for example, the rotundity of the earth and the “heavenly spherical star carrier model.” Making skillful use of philology, these authors cleverly reinterpreted the greatest technical and literary works of Chinese antiquity. From this sprang a new science wholly dedicated to the demonstration of the Chinese origin of astronomy and more generally of all European science and technology. Jean-Claude Martzloff, “Space and Time in Chinese Texts of Astronomy and of Mathematical Astronomy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, ''Chinese Science'' 11 (1993-94): 66-92 (69) Nevertheless, the Chinese, through observation of Lunar Eclipse and Solar Eclipse , understood that the celestial bodies (if not the earth) were spherical in shape. The Polymath Chinese scientist Shen Kuo (1031-1095 AD) once wrote:
Writing more than a thousand years before Shen, however, Jing Fang of the Han Dynasty wrote in the 1st century BC:
Apparently this idea of spherical celestial bodies had become the dominant accepted theory even by the ancient Han Dynasty, since it was the philosopher Wang Chong (27-97 AD) who was ardently opposed to this idea that the mainstream ' Confucian scholars' were propagating.Needham, Volume 3, 413. However, in a more recent work reviewing Needham's hypotheses, the English scholar Cullen emphasizes the point that there was actually no concept of a round earth in ancient Chinese astronomy: A century later Chiang Chi attempted to meet the objection with a hypothesis of the curvilinear propagation of light along the celestial sphere. Here, if at all, we might have expected to find some reference to the sphericity of the earth, but, as already noted, Chinese astronomy shows no trace of this idea.Christopher Cullen, “Joseph Needham on Chinese Astronomy”, ''Past and Present'', No. 87. (May, 1980), pp. 39-53 (49) MODERN TIMES See Also: Flat Earth mythology The common misconception that people before the '', (Touchstone Books, 1996), p. 56 Actually, sailors were probably among the first to know of the curvature of Earth from daily observations — seeing how shore landscape features (or masts of other ships) gradually descend/ascend near the horizon. . Flammarion's caption translates to "''A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet...''"]] During the 19th century, the Romantic conception of a European " Dark Age " gave much more prominence to the Flat Earth model than it ever possessed historically. The widely circulated woodcut of a man poking his head through the firmament of a flat Earth to view the mechanics of the spheres, executed in the style of the 16th century cannot be traced to an earlier source than , but not to any known medieval source. In its original form, the woodcut included a decorative border that places it in the 19th century; in later publications, some claiming that the woodcut did, in fact, date to the 16th century, the border was removed. Flammarion, according to anecdotal evidence, had commissioned the woodcut himself. In any case, no source of the image earlier than Flammarion's book is known. In ''Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians'', Jeffrey Russell (professor of history at University of California, Santa Barbara) claims that the Flat Earth theory is a fable used to impugn pre-modern civilization, especially that of the Middle Ages in Europe. Today essentially all professional medievalists agree with Russell that the "medieval flat Earth" is a nineteenth-century fabrication, and that the few verifiable "flat Earthers" were the exception. Transvaal perspective In 1898 during his solo Circumnavigation of the world Joshua Slocum encountered such a group in the Transvaal Republic. Three Boers, one of them a clergyman, presented Slocum with a pamphlet in which they set out to prove that the world was flat. President Kruger advanced the same view, "'You don't mean ''round'' the world,' said the president; 'it is impossible! You mean ''in'' the world. Impossible!'" Joshua Slocum, ''Sailing Alone Around the World'', (New York: The Century Company, 1900), chaps. 17-18. {Link without Title} The Flat Earth Society See Also: Flat Earth Society The last known group of Flat Earth proponents, the Flat Earth Society , kept the concept alive and at one time claimed a few thousand followers. The society declined in the 1990s following a fire at its headquarters in California and the death of its last president, Charles K. Johnson , in 2001.Donad E. Simanek, ''The Flat Earth''. In 2004, a new Flat Earth Society (not directly connected to Charles K. Johnson's) was founded and currently maintains the [http://www.theflatearthsociety.org Flat Earth Society website and forum . William Carpenter (1830-1896) maintained that "There are rivers that flow for hundreds of miles towards the level of the sea without falling more than a few feet — notably, The Nile , which, in a thousand miles, falls but a foot. A level expanse of this extent is quite incompatible with the idea of the Earth's 'convexity.'"William Carpenter, ''One hundred proofs that the earth is not a globe, (Baltimore: The author, 1885). {Link without Title} Carpenter also presented aeronautic testimony that even at the great observable heights no curvature of the earth is observed, and fits with the idea of a flat-earth, since it is the nature of level surfaces to rise to a level with the human eye. English scientist Samuel Rowbotham (1816-1885), writing under the pseudonym "Parallax," published results of many experiments which tested the curvatures of water over lakes. He also produced studies which purported to show the effects of ships disappearing into the horizon can be explained by the laws of perspective in relation to the human eye.Parallax (Samuel Birley Rowbotham), ''Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe'', Third edition, (London:Simpkin, Marshall, and Co.,1881). {Link without Title} Flat-Earth president Charles K. Johnson, who spent years examining the studies of flat and round earth theories, produced supposed evidence of a conspiracy against flat-earth: "The idea of a spinning globe is only a conspiracy of error that Moses, Columbus, and FDR all fought…" His article was published in Science Digest , 1980, and has since achieved much controversy. The magazine, Science Digest, goes on to state, "If it is a sphere, the surface of a large body of water must be curved. The Johnsons have checked the surfaces of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea (a shallow salt lake in southern California near the Mexican border) without detecting any curvature."8 Ibn Baz controversy Between 1993 and 1995, various newspapers and magazines published accounts that the late Abd-al-Aziz Ibn Abd-Allah Ibn Baaz , who was at the time the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia , had said that the Earth is flat.Youssef M. Ibrahim, "Muslim Edicts Take on New Force", ''New York Times'', February 12, 1995. Baz strongly denied that claim, describing the allegation as a "pure lie." and saying that he only denied Earth's Rotation . [http://www.fatwa-online.com/fataawa/miscellaneous/miscellaneous/0040819.htm Supporters of Ibn Baz said that the book in which the flat earth claim was supposed to have been laid out does not exist, and that the entire controversy was based on one interview with Egyptian journalists. They said that Ibn Baz, as he clarified later, was referring to the surface of earth that we walk on being flat although he believed the Earth to be spherical. In Arabic , the same word is commonly used for both the earth as well as the ground. The journalist, having not paid attention to this distinction, misquoted Ibn Baz and created a story; the story was picked up by a Kuwait i magazine (''Assiyasah'') and from there spread around the world. Ibn Baz was an admirer and a scholar of the works of Ibn Taymiyyah , who did not support the flat earth theory. CULTURAL REFERENCES The notion of a flat Earth continues to be referred to in a wide range of contexts. An early mention in literature was Ludvig Holberg 's comedy ''Erasmus Montanus'' (1723). Erasmus Montanus meets considerable opposition when he claims the Earth is round, since all the peasants hold it to be flat. He is not allowed to marry his fiancée until he cries "The earth is flat as a pancake". In Rudyard Kipling 's ''The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat'', the protagonists spread the rumor that a Parish Council meeting had voted in favor of a flat Earth. The genre of Fantasy Fiction is particularly rich in references to the flat Earth. In C.S. Lewis ' '' The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader '' it is stated that the fictional world of Narnia is "round like a table" (i.e., flat), not "round like a ball", and the characters sail toward the edge of this world. Terry Pratchett 's Discworld novels from 1983 onwards, e.g. '' The Color Of Magic '' and '' Small Gods '', are set on a flat, Disc-shaped World resting on the backs of four huge elephants which are in turn standing on the back of an enormous turtle. The notion of a flat Earth has featured in various Computer Games . In the fictional Text Adventure universe of '' Zork '', Quendor is located on a flat planet which some believe to be held up by a giant humanoid called a Brogmoid . In the computer game '' Grim Fandango '', the world is flat, with a huge waterfall bordering the edge. One chapter of the game takes place on an island at the very edge of the world. The Golden Sun video game series is set in a flat world called ''Weyard''. '' Creation '' in the role playing game '' Exalted '' is a flat world thousands of miles in extent. SEE ALSO
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