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onward believed that the Earth was flat", and ascribes popularization of the flat-Earth myth to histories by John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, and Washington Irving. Russell claims "with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat-Earth error flourished most between 18, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over biological evolution. Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology." Historians of science David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge sphericity and even know its approximate circumference". Īccording to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of 'flat Earth darkness' among scholars, regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now. Belief in a flat Earth among educated Europeans was almost nonexistent from the Late Middle Ages onward, though fanciful depictions appear in art, such as the exterior panels of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which a disc-shaped Earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere. This knowledge spread with Greek influence such that during the Early Middle Ages (~600–1000 AD), most European and Middle Eastern scholars espoused Earth's sphericity. The belief was widespread in the Greek world when Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of Earth around 240 BC. The earliest clear documentation of the idea of a spherical Earth comes from the ancient Greeks ( 5th century BC). The myth of the flat Earth, or the flat-Earth error, is a modern historical misconception that European scholars and educated people during the Middle Ages believed the Earth to be flat. The famous "Flat Earth" Flammarion engraving originates with Flammarion's 1888 L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (p. Misconception that people in the Middle Ages believed Earth to be flat