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Did the Ancients know of the new hemispheres?

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  Posted by Elkstone (U3836042) on Sunday, 19th December 2010

  Did the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, knew or perhaps reckoned there probably was a large continent on western hemispere, and also a large continent on the southen hemisphere, namely Australia and antartica. I read somewhere they They assumed this from their map makers, trade winds, time it took ships to cross oceans etc. It was a myth they believed the earth was flat and ships would fall of the edge down a cliff, because they from a distance the sails of a ship always appeared first, giving away the curvature of the earth

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  Posted by an ex-nordmann - it has ceased to exist (U3472955) on Monday, 20th December 2010

  Hi Elkstone -
  
  Knowledge of a demonstrably spherical earth is quite ancient, and in Greece for example is known to have co-existed with other models (rectangular, disk-shaped etc) without any great record of controversy or argument. It appears that those who depended in any way on cartography for navigation purposes might well have also been those who most understood that the spherical option was correct. The alternatives were promoted by authors whose principal interests lay in philosophy or history so it is also feasible that they never intended such models to be taken with the literal interpretation we today are expected to invest in such diagramatic representation of the earth. Aristotle is credited with one of the earliest scientific "proofs" of the earth's spherical shape, but in fact he was demonstrating the veracity of what, even by his time, was a long tradition of representation of the earth in that form.
  
  Knowledge of a continent to the west however is not recorded, though speculation about landfall in the region was indeed rife throughout various European cultures over millennia (Atlantis and Hy-Brasil, for example), suggesting that it was possible that extremely occasional and accidental sightings may have filtered back over the centuries. The bulk of this speculation did not envisage a vast continent but instead tended to presume islands, island groups, or island remnants of a lost continent. There is no evidence that I am aware of myself for similar speculation concerning a possible continent south of Africa - though there was indeed much speculation about just how big Africa might be and it could well have been true that Phoenicians, with Egyptian promotion, even circumnavigated the continent to find this out.

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  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Tuesday, 21st December 2010

  I do not remember the writer but there was an ancient Greek text which analysed that according to the position of the known continents and the oceans, there should be 2 more continents on earth, the one west of the western ocean, i.e. the Atlantic Ocean. Effectively, what might had been done was a rough calculation of the size of the earth (down repeatedly - and most accurately by Eratosthenes - and as such using a rough calculation of the size of the known world, there would be found that the ocean around would be a huge expanse of Atlantic + Pacific + part of Indian ocean and as such it was easy for ancient people to imagine that if so, it was more possible to have other continents rather than having no continent at all and having a huge ocean linking western Europe to India.

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  Posted by LairigGhru (U14051689) on Monday, 27th December 2010

  Supporting Nik's post.
  
  The Greeks also reasoned that a continent matching the Arctic should theoretically exist at the Earth's other pole.
  
  Wasn't Eratosthenes' achievement astounding! His amazingly accurate calculation of the Earth's circumference was based on comparing the height of stick shadows 600 miles apart.

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  Posted by an ex-nordmann - it has ceased to exist (U3472955) on Friday, 31st December 2010

  We'll forgive him his assumption that the varying shadow length reflected (literally) the orbit of the sun around the earth as it was pulled by invisible giant horses.

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  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Friday, 31st December 2010

  I do not remember in which type of solar or earth system Eratosthenis believed.

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  Posted by LairigGhru (U14051689) on Tuesday, 4th January 2011

  We'll forgive him his assumption that the varying shadow length reflected (literally) the orbit of the sun around the earth as it was pulled by invisible giant horses.Β 
  
  I wonder where you got that from! It doesn't seem to square with the clever and learned individual whose doings have been passed down to us. He was in charge of the famous Great Library in Alexandria, for example (sadly destroyed by a fire).

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  Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011

  Elkstone, much was written about the possibility of other landmasses by Greco Roman writers although it was little more than speculation. In part this arose from the realisation that the earth was spherical but just as important was the prevalence of the belief that it was divided into climatic zones. The oecomene or known world occupied the temperate climatic zone, lying between frigid northern wastes that were thought to be too cold to support life and the supposedly uninhabited equatorial torrid zone where the land was parched and the seas boiled. If the earth was a sphere then the torrid zone would lead into a southern temperate zone that was also capable of supporting life and this is where most writers' imaginations really took off. These beings were described as Antipodes, literally those with their feet opposite to ours. Ptolemy aside, it would appear ancient writers believed that Africa did not stretch so far south and as the known world was generally believed to be surrounded by a body of water the Antipodes were thought to live on their own isolated continent. By the Christian era these debates centred around whether the creatures that existed in the far recesses of unknown lands were descended from Adam and Eve, although such discussions often sailed fairly close to what the church deemed unacceptable.
  
  This only suggested two habitable continents yet Crates of Mallos, writing in the second century BC, considered there were four roughly equal size landmasses, two in the northern hemisphere and two in the southern hemisphere. This is who Nick was referring to earlier. The bulk of his ideas have come down to us through Macrobius's commentary on Cicero's the Dream of Scipio so there are several degrees of separation from the source. However according to the theory the inhabitants of the other northern continent were described as Perioicoi or people round about while the Antipodeans lived to their direct south taking the concept of their feet being directly opposite ours to its logical conclusion. The inhabitants of the continent to the south of the known world were described as Aetheopian Antoicoi, or the Ethiopians living opposite to us presumably to distinguish them from those living in Africa as it was then understood.

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  Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011

  LairigGru, while Eratosthenes estimate was very close to the actual size of the earth's circumpherence and the most commonly cited in the late middle ages, having been preserved by Eusabius of Caeserae, it was actually the errors in a later calculation using the same method that ultimately lead to attempts to circumnavigate the globe via a western route and thus the conquest and colonisation of the new world.
  
  The argument between Columbus and the Sages of Salamanca was in part over who had the more accurate calculation of the size of the earth and the distance between the east and west of Eurasia. At heart lay the difference between Eratosthenes figure and that arrived at by Posidonius which was roughly one sixth smaller. Posidonius' estimate was preserved in Ptolemy's Geography but had been largely unknown in the Christian west until the beginning of the fifteenth century. Ptolemy also suggested that the distance from east to west across Eurasia was much greater than the Sages believed and with some manipulation of the distances cited, Columbus was able to further lengthen the distance across the landmass so that the western route to China and India seemed far closer than the southern route that the Portuguese dominated. The sages were quite correct that the voyage he proposed would not reach the far East and the fact that the New World just happened to be where Columbus believed there ought to be land left him convinced that he had been right all along.

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  Posted by LairigGhru (U14051689) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011

  Thanks for this.

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  Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Thursday, 6th January 2011

  LairagGhru, I agree Eratosthenes' achievement was outstanding. Even more fantastic was the measurement of the distance and size of the Moon, quite accurately, and they made a decent stab at measuring the distance of the Sun (some 6 million miles I think).
  
  Who was that Roman writer who speculated about beings living on the Moon?
  
  

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  Posted by Temperance (U14455940) on Friday, 7th January 2011

  
  Lucian of Samosata - "A True Story".
  

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  Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Friday, 7th January 2011

  Many thanks Temperance. And, apropos this discussion, the Wikipedia entry for the work states that the story involved the discovery of a new continent. See
  
  

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