Table of Contents

Introduction: ‘The Blue Marble’
1 Babylon: ‘The four quarters of the Earth’
2 Egypt: ‘The black loam and the red sand’
3 Persia: ‘Order and Deceit’
4 Archaic Greece: ‘The Shield of Achilles’
5 The Origins of Greek Thought: ‘Equally distant from all extremes’
6 The Presocratics and Socrates: ‘Floating on air’
7 Plato: ‘Flat or round, whichever is better’
8 Aristotle: ‘Necessarily spherical’
9 Greek Debate on the Shape of the World: ‘Either round or triangular or some other shape’
10 Romans on the Globe: ‘The circle of the world’
11 India: ‘The mountain at the North Pole’
12 The Sassanian Persians: ‘Good thoughts, good words, good deeds’
13 Early Judaism: ‘From the ends of the Earth’
14 Christianity: ‘All things established by divine command’
15 Islam: ‘The Earth laid out like a carpet’
16 Later Judaism: ‘The wise men of the nations have defeated the wise men of Israel’
17 Europe in the Early Middle Ages: ‘Equally round in all directions’
18 High Medieval Views of the World: ‘The Earth has the shape of a globe’
19 Columbus and Copernicus: ‘New worlds will be found’
20 China: ‘The heavens are round and the Earth is square’
21 China and the West: ‘Like the yoke in a hen’s egg’
22 The Globe Goes Global: ‘At the round Earth’s imagined corners’
23 Today: ‘There’s nothing particularly exciting about a round world’
Afterword

References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

About the Author

James Hannam is the author of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (2009) and What Everyone Needs to Know about Tax (2017). He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and lives in Kent.

Reviews

'A tour d’horizon that spans time as well as space, this is a thrilling intellectual adventure story.' – Tom Holland, author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind; 'In an age of globalisation, James Hannam’s playful and erudite book reminds us of the global origins of our common understanding of the spherical earth, stretching from Babylon to NASA. A truly all-encompassing book: a wonderful achievement and a delight to read.' – Jerry Brotton, author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps; 'An exploration of one of humankind’s oldest and most profound insights, The Globe is a work of compulsively readable myth-busting. As amiable as it is scholarly, James Hannam’s book uses the history of the spherical Earth to provide a global tour of cosmologies through the ages.' – Philip Ball, author of The Book of Minds