Paragraph on “What were man’s first ideas about the Universe?” complete paragraph for Class 9, Class 10, Class 11 and Class 12
What were man’s first ideas about the Universe?
All the peoples of the Ancient World thought that the Earth lay at the centre of the Universe and most of them thought that it was flat. The ancient Egyptians, for example, believed that the sky was the body of the Goddess Nut. They thought that Geb held her up and that each day a boat ferried Ra (the Sun) across the arch made by her body from east to west.
The Greeks, who made many very import-ant advances in astronomy between 700 BC and AD 200 had, with only a few exceptions, no doubt whatever that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe, and that the Sun, Moon and planets all travelled around the Earth. These ideas persisted in Europe until the seventeenth century.