Maybe it’s the other way around, and it’s the Chinese elite who was unusually and stubbornly conservative on this, trusting the wisdom of their ancestors over foreign devilry (would be a pretty Confucian thing to do). The Greeks realised the Earth was round from things like seeing sails appear over the horizon. Any sailing peoples thinking about this would have noticed sooner or later.
Kind of a long shot, but did Polynesian people have ideas on this, for example?
There is a large difference between sooner and later. Highly non-obvious ideas will be discovered later, not sooner. The fact that China didn’t rediscover the theory in more than two thousand years means that it the ability to sail the ocean didn’t make it obvious.
Kind of a long shot, but did Polynesian people have ideas on this, for example?
As far as we know, nobody did, except for early Greece. There is some uncertainty about India, but these sources are dated later and from a time when there was already some contact with Greece, so they may have learned it from them.
Well, it’s hard to tell because most other civilizations at the required level of wealth to discover this (by which I mean both sailing and surplus enough to have people who worry about the shape of the Earth at all) could one way or another have learned it via osmosis from Greece. If you only have essentially two examples, how do you tell whether it was the one who discovered it who was unusually observant rather than the one who didn’t who was unusually blind? But it’s an interesting question, it might indeed be a relatively accidental thing which for some reason was accepted sooner than you would have expected (after all, sails disappearing could be explained by an Earth that’s merely dome-shaped; the strongest evidence for a completely spherical shape was probably the fact that lunar eclipses feature always a perfect disc shaped shadow, and even that requires interpreting eclipses correctly, and having enough of them in the first place).
Maybe it’s the other way around, and it’s the Chinese elite who was unusually and stubbornly conservative on this, trusting the wisdom of their ancestors over foreign devilry (would be a pretty Confucian thing to do). The Greeks realised the Earth was round from things like seeing sails appear over the horizon. Any sailing peoples thinking about this would have noticed sooner or later.
Kind of a long shot, but did Polynesian people have ideas on this, for example?
There is a large difference between sooner and later. Highly non-obvious ideas will be discovered later, not sooner. The fact that China didn’t rediscover the theory in more than two thousand years means that it the ability to sail the ocean didn’t make it obvious.
As far as we know, nobody did, except for early Greece. There is some uncertainty about India, but these sources are dated later and from a time when there was already some contact with Greece, so they may have learned it from them.
Well, it’s hard to tell because most other civilizations at the required level of wealth to discover this (by which I mean both sailing and surplus enough to have people who worry about the shape of the Earth at all) could one way or another have learned it via osmosis from Greece. If you only have essentially two examples, how do you tell whether it was the one who discovered it who was unusually observant rather than the one who didn’t who was unusually blind? But it’s an interesting question, it might indeed be a relatively accidental thing which for some reason was accepted sooner than you would have expected (after all, sails disappearing could be explained by an Earth that’s merely dome-shaped; the strongest evidence for a completely spherical shape was probably the fact that lunar eclipses feature always a perfect disc shaped shadow, and even that requires interpreting eclipses correctly, and having enough of them in the first place).