Astronomical Myths: Based on Flammarions's "History of the Heavens"

by J. F. Blake; Camille Flammarion

Fig. 31.—Egyptian Representation of the Earth.

An ancient Egyptian papyrus in the library of Paris gives a very curious hieroglyphical representation of the universe. The earth is here figured under the form of a reclining figure, and is covered with leaves. The heavens are personified by a goddess, which forms the vault by her star-bespangled body, which is elongated in a very peculiar manner. Two boats, carrying, one the rising sun, and the other the setting sun, are represented as moving along the heavens over the body of the goddess. In the centre of the picture is the god, Maon, a divine intelligence, which presides over the equilibrium of the universe.

We will now pass on from the early ideas of the general shape and situation of the world to inquire into the first outlines of geographical knowledge of details.

Of all the ancient writings which deal with such questions, the Hebrew Scriptures have the greatest antiquity, and in them are laid down many details of known countries, from which a fair map of the world as known to them might be made out. The prophet Esdras believed that six-sevenths of the earth was dry land—an idea which could not well be exploded till the great oceans had been traversed and America discovered.

More interesting, as being more complete, and written to a certain extent for the very purpose of relating what was known of the geography of the earth, are the writings of the oldest Grecian poets. The first elements of Grecian geography are contained in the two national and almost sacred poems, the Iliad and Odyssey. So important have these writings been considered in regard to ancient geography, that for many centuries discussions have been carried on with regard to the details, though evidently fictitious, of the voyage of Ulysses, and twenty lines of the Iliad have furnished matter for a book of thirty volumes.

The shield of Achilles, forged by Vulcan and described in the eighteenth book of the Iliad, gives us an authentic representation of the primitive cosmographical ideas of the age. The earth is there figured as a disc, surrounded on all sides by the River Ocean. However strange it may appear to us, to apply the term river to the ocean, it occurs too often in Homer and the other ancient poets to admit of a doubt of its being literally understood by them. Hesiod even describes the sources of the ocean at the western extremity of the world, and the representation of these sources was preserved from age to age amongst authors posterior to Homer by nearly a thousand years. Herodotus says plainly that the geographers of his time drew their maps of the world according to the same ideas; the earth was figured with them as a round disc, and the ocean as a river, which washed it on all sides.

The earth's disc, the orbis terrarum, was covered according to Homer by a solid vault or firmament, beneath which the stars of the day and night were carried by chariots supported by the clouds. In the morning the sun rose from the eastern ocean, and in the evening it declined into the western; and a vessel of gold, the mysterious work of Vulcan, carried it quickly back by the north, to the east again. Beneath the earth Homer places, not the habitation of the dead, the caverns of Hades, but a vault called Tartarus, corresponding to the firmament. Here lived the Titans, the enemies of the gods, and no breath of wind, no ray of light, ever penetrated to this subterranean world. Writers subsequent to Homer by a century determined even the height of the firmament and the depth of Tartarus. An anvil, they said, would take nine days to fall from heaven to earth, and as many more to fall from earth to the bottom of Tartarus. This estimate of the height of heaven was of course far too small. If a body were to fall for nine days and nights, or 777,600 seconds under the attraction of the earth, it would only pass over 430,500 miles, that is not much more than half as far again as the moon. A ray of light would only take two seconds to pass over that distance, whereas it takes eight minutes to reach us from the sun, and four hours to come from Neptune—to say nothing of the distance of the stars.

The limits of the world in the Homeric cosmography were surrounded by obscurity. The columns of which Atlas was the guardian were supported on unknown foundations, and disappeared in the systems subsequent to Homer. Beyond the mysterious boundary where the earth ended and the heavens began an indefinite chaos spread out—a confused medley of life and inanity, a gulf where all the elements of heaven, Tartarus, and earth and sea are mixed together, a gulf of which the gods themselves are afraid.

Ideas such as these prevailed long after geometers and astronomers had proved the spherical form of the globe, and they were revived by the early Christian geographers and have left their trace even on the common language of to-day.