A Whole New World

In Latin class today we learned that a term for the world was orbis terrarum.  Why is that significant?  Orbis means "circle."  Why is that significant?  It proves if people knew Latin we would all be a lot smarter, or could at least avoid a common historical myth!

The myth goes: nobody believed Christopher Columbus that he could sail west to Asia because they all thought the world was flat.  He was the lone person who thought the world was round.  Ancient people are so dumb!

WRONG!  All educated people since at least Aristotle knew the world was round.  Chinese and Indians discovered this on their own around the same time.  They did some advanced math to discover this.  They simply thought the ocean between Europe and Asia was too big to sail.

The big disagreement for Columbus was the size of the earth.  I don't have the exact numbers in front of me since I'm writing this off the top of my head, but his (mis)translation of an Arabic text put the world at some thousands of miles smaller than everyone else thought (everyone else was pretty darn close).  He tried to convince the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese of this "fact" but they were all smarter than him.  The reason why Spain, more accurately Queen Isabella, funded his journey was, well, why not?  All it cost was 3 ships, the potential payoff was huge!  The classic low cost, high upside deal.

In the end, Columbus basically lucked out that he ran into the Americas (yes Europeans had known about some land to the west, but that's another issue).  If not for the Americas, he and his crew would have died well before they reached Asia.

How did the myth that everyone thought the world was flat come about?  I don't have a good answer to that, but I could easily go with "historians in the late 18th and early 19th centuries weren't very good about checking facts."  That, and, "let's make sure the ancients look dumb."  What I didn't realize before was, if people knew Latin, this myth may not have started in the first place.  After all, why would the Romans call a flat earth "circular earth"?  The lesson, as always, is learn your Latin!