We live on a globe. Humans have known that for thousands of years. Despite what you may have been taught in school, Columbus knew he wasn’t going to sail off the edge of the globe. That said, he drastically underestimated the size of the earth. Part of the error came from a unit mix-up (Arabic miles were longer than Roman miles) and some from salesmanship. To fund his expedition, Columbus needed to convince a wealthy patron that sailing west was the quickest way to eastern riches. This is why we refer to the Caribbean islands as the Indies.
Shape of the Earth
Greek philosophers first raised the concept of a spherical world roughly 2,500 years ago. A few centuries later, Eratosthenes used shadows to compute the circumference of the Earth at 252,000 stadia. A century later, Posidonius calculated a circumference of 240,000 stadia. The length of a stadion varied, but the consensus is that they were within one or two percent of the modern value.
First Globe
The oldest referenced globe comes from Strabo who cites the earlier work of Crates of Mallus. Crates was the head librarian in Pergamon, a Greek city in the modern Turkish province of Bergama. His globe divided the world into five zones including an encircling equatorial ocean (named Oceanus). The known continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia had opposites on the other side of Oceanus. Neither man had physical proof that the ‘opposite’ continents existed. Their existence was pure supposition. No contemporary version of the Crates globe survived.
Other Old Globes
The scholars of the Islamic Golden Age advanced the spherical Earth concept and produced more accurate maps than the Greeks. They made terrestrial globes and even introduced the first one to China in 1276, none of those ancient globes survived to modern times. Islamic astronomers also made celestial globes, which depict the stars. They omit the sun, moon, and planets. The oldest existing celestial globe was made in Valencia by Ibrahim ibn Said al-Sahli in the late 11th century.
Oldest Surviving Globe
Martin Behaim completed the Erdapfel (‘earth apple’ in German) in 1492. A merchant, navigator, and mapmaker, Behaim had spent time in Lisbon, sailed the coast of West Africa, and briefly lived in the Azores. Completed before Columbus returned, the Erdapfel doesn’t include the Americas. In their place is an enlarged Eurasia, an oversized Japan, and the mythical Saint Brendan’s Island. It’s currently housed in the Germanic Museum in Nuremberg.
Map of the Erdapfel ocean separating Europe from Asia (Cinangu=Japan) courtesy of Wikimedia.
Bonsus picture of the actual Erdapfel globe.
As always thanks for reading.
Armen
Note to pay the bills: While the Warders series doesn’t feature a globe, it does have an original world map. If you’re interested in a James Bond-like thriller in a fantasy setting, then, check out a summary of the series here or find links to purchase books here.
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