Shape of the World I: Heaven and Earth

Steven Dutch, Professor Emeritus, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay


Some Non-Western World Concepts

The great temple at Borobudur is a metaphysical map of the Buddhist universe withmultiple levels. The Aztecs had an even more complex idea of the universe with 21 levels.There were 13 levels of heaven and nine of the underworld. The earth was considered commonto both sets of levels.

The Chinese viewed themselves as the center of world (as did many, possibly most otherpeoples). They constructed highly detailed maps, but, like most Chinese innovations, thepurpose was government and administration rather than science or technology in the Westernsense.

The Egyptians developed surveying and astronomy for more pragmatic purposes. Aknowledge of astronomy helped predict the annual Nile flood, and surveying helpedre-establish boundaries of land ownership afterward.

Are Myths "True"?

One important question we must answer is this: to what extent were myths intended to beaccurate depictions of physical reality? The answer is probably very little.

Drawing a distinction between literal and non-literal interpretation is a very Westernconcept, reinforced especially by the printing press. Thanks to the printing press,Western culture developed concepts of individual authorship and printed facts asauthoritative that simply did not exist in other times and cultures.

A very common approach to disparate beliefs in many cultures is syncretism:switching from system to system as desired without concern for overall logicalconsistency, or compartmentalizing beliefs so that conflicts are avoided. It's doubtful ifmany people in ancient times ever used the creation myths of their culture to attempt tocalculate the age of the Earth, for example.

Here's an example from modern times. Present Saudi Arabia dates only from the 1920'swhen the Saud family subjugated rival clans. The key event was a daring raid on thecapital of Riyadh (then a small town of mud brick houses) by the first King Saud. Hisretelling of the story became a focal point of any ceremonial occasion. The Kingfrequently told the story with varying details. After one particularly fanciful retelling,a long-time British friend remarked "I never heard you tell it that way before."King Saud replied "I just felt like telling it that way." Clearly, in thiscultural setting, the storytelling and adventure were paramount and the literal detailswere of secondary importance. Yet the King, who freely admitted varying and embellishingthe story, and was even proud of it, would have been deeply offended if someone accusedhim of inconsistency or telling a falsehood. Literalism was simply not the point here.

In our culture, one of the most damaging examples of applying literalism where it wasalmost certainly not intended in the original culture is the recurring conflict betweenscience and literal interpretations of the Bible.

Complicating matters is the probability that many ancient myths had at least some basisin reality while others were complete inventions or so altered in retelling that theiroriginal factual basis has been wholly obscured. It's important to distinguish betweenbelieving the entire myth and attempting to identify what its original basis might havebeen. See for example Cosmas' Mount Meru, Ptolemy's Mountains of the Moon, and the searchfor the Garden of Eden, below.

Ancient Greek Ideas of the World

The Ionians (6th century B.C.) were a culture that arose on the islands of the Aegeanand the coast of Asia Minor (now Turkey). They are the first people in the Western worldto have something of our experimental, pragmatic approach to science and technology, andto attempt to understand Nature in terms of natural rather than supernatural forces. Someimportant Ionians:

Read Chapter 7 in Sagan, The Backbone of Night, for more on the significance of theIonians.

The prevailing ancient view of the heavens was that the planets moved in concentricspheres and were associated with the gods. Our days of the week hark back to that time.The Romans adopted the Greek gods and gave them Latin names by which we still know theplanets. The table below shows the Roman gods (2nd column) and the days of the week inmodern Spanish (Saturday and Sunday were named for their Christian significance.) NorthernEuropeans matched their gods up with the nearest Roman equivalent (3rd column) and that'swhere we get our days of the week.

Day of Week (Spanish) Roman Deity Norse Deity English Day of Week
Domingo (Lord's Day) Sol Sun Sunday
Lunes Luna Moon Monday
Martes Mars Tyr Tuesday
Miercoles Mercury Wodin Wednesday
Jueves Jove (Jupiter) Thor Thursday
Viernes Venus Freya Friday
Sabado (Sabbath) Saturn ---- Saturday

Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in the first half of the second century A.D., was one ofthe most influential of ancient scientists. Although best known for his contributions toastronomy, he also had a powerful impact on geography. He was apparently the first personto devise a sophisticated map projection that represented latitude and longitude by curvedlines.

Deep in the interior of Africa, near the source of the Nile, Ptolemy placed amysterious mountain range called the Mountains of the Moon. The fabled Mountains of theMoon actually exist. They are now called the Ruwenzori, located on the border of Ugandaand Zaire. They reach almost 17,000 feet and are covered with glaciers even close to theequator. The summits are usually concealed by cloud. On the rare occasions when thesummits were visible, the lowland people had no idea what the white covering of thesummits was. Some people guessed it might be salt.

How did we discover the Earth is round?

One possibility is that the shadow of the earth cast on the Moon during an eclipse isalways round. However, the idea that we are seeing the Earth's shadow cast on the Moon is,if you think about it, a very bold one. I suspect we would already have to have someconcept of the Earth as a body in space before we could realize we are seeing the Earth'sshadow cast on the Moon.

A frequently-cited hypothesis is that people noticed that the hull of a shipdisappeared over the horizon before the sails did. But at the 20 miles or so distance tothe horizon, an ancient ship would have been nothing but a speck.

On the other hand, if you're a Minoan sailing from Crete to mainland Greece, or viceversa, there are 8000-foot mountains visible from the sea at both ends of the trip. Inwinter they are covered with snow. I suspect the crucial observation was made by someoneon the deck of a ship watching mountains appear and disappear over the horizon.

Here's another possibility. Tall thunderheads are often seen beyond the horizon withjust their tops visible. Some can be 20-30,000 feet high. It's easy to conclude that thehorizon is blocking our view of the bottom.

Why is there a horizon at all? A sea horizon looks crisp, sharp, and close by (it is).Why don't we just see forever? All of these ideas may have contributed toward the ideathat the Earth is round. The common theme is that the horizon is blocking our view ofthings beyond it, implying that the surface of the Earth must be curved.

Medieval Concepts of the World

Contrary to innumerable myths, the concept that the Earth is round was neverlost during the Middle Ages! This durable and ideologically-driven myth is throughlydebunked by Jeffrey Burton Russell in Inventing the Flat Earth (Praeger, 1991).

The early medieval 6th century mystic Cosmas deserves better than he is treated in thevideo. He had travelled in India and mixed a lot of eastern concepts in with hisChristianity; for his time he was quite an explorer. In an age when most people never goout of sight of their birthplace, he went to India. He was inspired enough by ideas inanother culture to try to adapt them to his own; that's a rare open-mindedness in any timeand place. Cosmas pictured the Earth as the bottom of a box with the heavens forming avault above. Cosmas never really represented the mainstream of thinking about the Earth'sshape, and like many other ancient concepts of the Earth, his was probably not entirelyintended to be a literal depiction of the physical form of the Earth.

In the north of his Earth, Cosmas placed a great mountain. In ancient times thismountain was called Mount Meru. This is another fabled mountain that actually exists. Itis an isolated 23,000-foot peak in Tibet now called Mount Kailas. In Buddhist and Hindubelief it is considered the center of the world and is still a major focus of pigrimages.Pilgrims take several days to circle the mountain. The Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus andSutlej (a major tributary of the Indus) all have their sources nearby - the four largestrivers of the Indian subcontinent.

What Mount Kailas actually is is as remarkable as its myth. The peak has a beautifulsmooth pyramidal form, quite different from the jagged shapes of many Himalayan peaks.From base to summit it consists of conglomerate and sandstone, the remains of debriseroded off the Himalayas as they were being uplifted. At one time within the last fewmillion years, this deposit of debris covered the entire region to above the presentsummit.

The text version of Shape of the World quotes a number of early religious writers ascondemning "science". This can be misleading if you don't know that Latin scientia>means "knowledge", and often referred to philosophical speculation. Some ofthese speculations were on pretty much the same level as the fabled medieval question ofhow many angels could fit on a pinhead, or in more modern terms, where Elvis might behiding. Before the invention of the telescope, speculating on the nature of the stars (asopposed to practical uses like timekeeping and navigation) was pretty unproductive.With only a tiny part of the world mapped, speculating on undiscovered continents ispointless.If many of the more extreme early religious writers were prettyanti-intellectual or frittered away their energies on trivia, so did some of the movementsthey condemned.

Isidor of Seville (7th century) contributed one of the most popular of medieval mapstyles and one of the most enduring of geographic fads. The map style was the T-map, witheast at the top. The known world was a circle surrounded by water and divided into threecontinents by a T-shaped waterway. Asia was the top half of the circle. The left crossbarof the T was the River Don and the right the Red Sea. The stem of the T was theMediterranean with Europe on the left and Africa on the right. Some maps weregeographically accurate, others simply schematic. Isidore's fad was the search for theGarden of Eden.

It's important to keep things like this in context. Focusing on the aspects of theMiddle Ages that seem to us most absurd is misleading, just as if someone 500 years fromnow were to conclude that we spent all our time searching for Elvis.

The search for the Garden of Eden is treated humorously in Shape of the World, aspeculation fully as idle as any condemned by early Church writers. The account in thebook of Genesis pictures Eden as surrounded by four rivers, two of which, theTigris and Euphrates, are well known and the other two are unidentified. Interestinglyenough, there are three places where the Tigris and Euphrates are close together: theirdelta on the Persian Gulf, near Baghdad, and near their source in Turkey. Most Westernsearchers have tended to focus on Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia) but the Kurds,understandably, believe it was in their region.

The medieval upsurge in guidebooks for pilgrims, as well as the craze for relics,actually mark an important step in the evolution of Western thought. Europeans begandemanding physical evidence for their beliefs. It marks the return of an empirical,Ionian sort of mentality.

Our existing manuscripts of Ptolemy's Geographia are due to the monk MaximusPlenudes who discovered a text of Ptolemy's work in 1295. It had Ptolemy's lists ofgeographic coordinates but no maps. Plenudes commissioned local artists to produce maps,probably incorporating existing geographic knowledge. Thus the versions we have today area hybrid of Ptolemy's and medieval information.

Essential Points

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Created 13 January 1998, Last Update 28 January 1998