Nevertheless, it had been claimed that the Bible presents a reasonably clear and consistent view of a tiered universe based on the Sumero-Babylonian model. In terms of cosmology and creation, the Old Testament owes much to Mesopotamian mythology, which has led to claims that the Bible is a 'flat-earth book'.2 Although the scriptures do contain disparate passages relating to cosmology they are not a systematic study of the heavens, however, rendering any presentation of a Biblical world-view a patchwork of statements scattered through books written over several centuries. It remained the same for the ancient Hebrews, who were flanked by the Egyptians to the south-west and the Sumero-Babylonians to the north-east, and whose cosmology resembled the assumptions of their powerful neighbours about the form of the earth. This being the case, in the eyes of the oldest civilizations for which we have records, whether in the form of Babylonian clay tablets or Egyptian papyri, the earth continued to be a flat surface of a circular or rectangular shape.1 And so the situation remained while later Egyptians made voyages to the so-called land of Punt, thought to be along the coast of East Africa, and other evidence suggests that they circumnavigated the continent, such experiences had no impact on ideas about the shape of the earth. The sky, meanwhile, was the goddess Nut, mother of the sun-god Re, who was depicted as a giant standing cow or a young woman arched over the earth like a canopy.
![flat earth firmament flat earth firmament](https://theserapeum.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/NASA-FRAUD.jpg)
![flat earth firmament flat earth firmament](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hmC94RLFJXM/WBcq_QwjJGI/AAAAAAAAnEg/pzCbsAbSydwR_pyUqv9lgkkwncYJWDzPQCLcB/s640/NASA%2BCan%2527t%2BGo%2BBeyond%2BLow%2BEarth%2BOrbit%2B-%2BFlat%2BEarth%2BFirmament%2B8.png)
While the Egyptian system differed in detail from the Sumero-Babylonian world-view, it too personified natural phenomena, representing the earth as the earth-god, Geb, lying outstretched to create the plane. For the Egyptians, the same triple-decker arrangement applied, with the sky resting on four pillars, forked poles or mountain peaks rising from the corners of the flat earth beneath.
![flat earth firmament flat earth firmament](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/3vv9ZGFRmbE/maxresdefault.jpg)
Although these peoples left texts describing a range of cosmological theories - too many to speak of a single, overarching Mesopotamian world-view - they developed the idea of a tripartite universe, with the earth as a flatsurface ruled by the god Enlil, sandwiched between the sky and the underworld. The first of these are the Sumerians and Babylonians, who inhabited Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates (the site of modern Iraq) from c. This proves both that the earth is spherical and that its periphery is not large, for otherwise such a small change of position could not have had such an immediate effect.ĪRISTOTLE, On the Heavens (Book II, 350 BC)īEYOND THE FAIRYTALE LAND of heroes and villains and momentous conflicts between truth and falsehood on an individual, cultural and conceptual scale, flat-earth belief can be traced back to some of the most ancient civilizations in world history. shows not only that the earth is spherical but that it is of no great size, since a small change of position on our part southward or northward visibly alters the circle of the horizon, so that the stars above our heads change their position considerably, and we do not see the same stars as we move to the North or South.