La imagen del mundo en la Antigüedad

La evolución de las ideas sobre la forma de la Tierra, de Tales de Mileto a Ptolomeo

Abstract

From de fifth century b.C. to the Renaissance, the idea of an Earth round and motion less located at the very center of a spheric Universe, was the dominant model within the Greek and European cultures. This "Ymago Mundi" provided good answers to certain theoreticaí and practical problems and explained well celestial phenomena and other facts related to terrestrial rotation. During the Classical Age of Greek civilization, its philosophers drew up cosmological hypothesis and theories, wich structured the vision of a closed world, limited by the sphere of' fixed stars . Beyond that sphere nothing existed. Ptolemy, the great astronomer of the second century, synthetized the astronomical observations and the theoretical propositionsoftheAncients. The Ptolemaic system,based in a World of concentric spheres centered in Earth was one of the great legacies of the anclen world to West civiliuuion.