3/2/2024 0 Comments Ancient maps of the flat earth![]() ![]() ![]() For those who had something more than rudimentary education we can make generalisations about what was the ‘common knowledge’ of the time. However we can know with relative precision how people who deliberately examined the question, in other words geographer,thought of it. ![]() ![]() We simply do not know how the ‘average person’ in Roman times, during the Middle Ages, or indeed until the end of the 18th century envisaged ‘the world’. If you lived in a society without maps, globes or that photograph – what would your image of the world be like? To such questions regarding historical societies we can give only guarded answers. It is used in religion books to suggest that the universe is somehow sacred, but it can equally be used to suggest the opposite: we are just a drop in the ocean of space. It can be used to support the belief that we now really understand the world around us or to support causes from greater political co-operation to ecology. This is to us far more than a photograph: it carries the tacit message that we can sum up our world in a glance, it is a tribute to our technology, and for different people it reinforces different beliefs. It is the photograph of the shimmering blue and white planet against the darkness of space, taken from a space-craft. The most interesting artefact we have indicating our view of the world is even more expressive than a map. It is built up from maps we have seen – either in books or advertising the globes that we have seen and spun and, of course, we all have met people from every area of the globe and know that we can fly right around it. We all have some sort of world map in our heads. Take ourselves as a starting point – artefacts which reflect our understanding of the world are everywhere. Their understanding of the world determined the limits of their ambitions. One the tasks of the historian is to reconstruct how people in earlier societies understood the world they lived in. Published in Features, Issue 1 (Spring 1993), Pre-history / Archaeology, Volume 1 The Earliest World Maps Known in Ireland (1:1) ![]()
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