Who knows geography stories? A little story about geography

Around the World in Eighty Days

The book tells the story of a gentleman, Fogg, who travels around the globe in 80 days from London because he makes a bet with his fellow players at the Improvement Club. Because of the time difference, I won the prize in the end. The descriptions in the book are very accurate and credible.

It can be said that the plots in Verne's book can be taken out one by one as many geographical stories.

The story of the shape of the earth: the legend of the floating earth.

In ancient times, human beings lived on the earth, and due to the barrier of mountains and oceans, they could only live in a small area. Intuitively, they mistake the earth for a mostly flat earth. People think of the earth as a land floating on the water.

In China, as early as the Zhou Dynasty more than 2,000 years ago, there was this kind of "the sky is round like a cover, and the place is like a chess game". In other words, the blue sky is like a hemispherical dome, and the earth is like a square chessboard, and the blue sky is connected to the sea. Of course, there are also people who believe that there is an Optimus Prime supporting the blue sky in all corners of the earth.

This kind of "heaven and round place" theory has been dominant in ancient China, and it has been widely spread, and we can still see the influence of this understanding to this day. For example, the Temple of Heaven in Beijing is round, while the Temple of Earth is square, which is a reflection of this idea.

Similar legends have been widely circulated among other peoples around the world.

The ancient Russians believed that the earth was like a round cake, carried on the back of three huge whales, and these three whales floated in the endless ocean. Ancient India is similar to the imagination of the Russians, except that they believed that it was a white elephant standing on the back of a whale that carried the earth.

The legends of ancient Greece and Rome are a little more specific. Since ancient Greece and Rome lived on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea at that time, the Als Mountains were bounded to the north and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. To the south of the Mediterranean Sea is the great desert of northern Africa.

Under the conditions of the time, they thought that the earth was like a huge shield, surrounded by an unfathomable ocean. Contrary to what our ancient beliefs were, they believed that the center of this shield-shaped land was a shallow sea (today's Mediterranean). The sea is surrounded by it.

A circle of land. To the north of this ring of land are mountains and beyond are the world's oceans.

These examples fully reflect that due to the limitations of the living environment, people have to imagine the shape of the earth according to some fragmentary and incomplete objective phenomena that they observe and come into contact with in their daily lives. The common feature of these understandings is that the earth is a relatively flat land in shape surrounded by the sea.