I’ve recently been binging on classical history, and I was recently reading Herodotus’s ‘Histories’ in which there’s a particular story he tells about the Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa (which he himself admits that he didn’t believe) where he describes a report from one of the sailors where they “on a westerly course round the southern end of Africa, had the sun to their right — to the northward of them.” I didn’t think much of the passage at the time (another gold digging, camel chasing, dog sized ant story), but I saw a lecture recently where Tom Holland (the historian) claimed that this tale was not only true, but that Herodotus had accidentally shown that the story proves that the Earth is a sphere. If this is truly the case, it’s an incredible story. But (and I hate to admit this) I just don’t quite understand the reasoning as to why this would be the case, and the story isn’t worth much if I can’t get there myself.
So, here’s to some of you friendly strangers, and the hope that you can help me out with a really cool anecdote to keep in my back pocket about how close that even people like Herodotus can be to making world shaking discoveries, but just not quite ready to make the final connection.
Edit: so that it’s a little closer to a question
While there’s always more to say on the subject, there was a good answer to this a while back from u/mythoplokos:
The short answer: no. This is a quite separate question from whether or not the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa, and logically even separate from the question of whether the observations Herodotus reports are compatible with a spherical Earth.
To quote my answer to the same question from a few weeks ago, in https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bhfy33/did_herodotus_accidentally_prove_that_the_world/
Herodotus, or the Phoenecian circumnavigation of Africa, do not prove that the Earth is round. The observation that the sun was to their north during the southern part of their journey is entirely compatible with a round earth, but it does not prove it.
Consider a flat Earth, with the sun 1000km above the equator. Travel to 1000km south of the equator, and the sun will be to the north, at an elevation of 45 degrees. The observed position of the sun during the Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa can be explained in terms of such a model, and does not require a round Earth. (It does require a nearby sun.)
There are other cosmologies that can also explain these observations, such as cosmologies where light doesn't travel in straight lines. AFAICT, the most interesting of these mainly result in the actual distance of the nearby sun being different from the "straight line" distance. The round Earth and flat Earth cosmologies can be differentiated by precision measurements of the altitude of the sun vs distance travelled south or north of the equator, but Herodotus in this account does not provide such precise measurements. Noting that flat Earth cosmologies require a nearby sun (and stars), this can provide a means of rejecting them. Of course, the observation that the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse shows that the Earth is spherical is also available.
Noting the very long time I took to answer this question, I'll also link the recently-asked identi-question: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/brj7bw/did_herodotus_accidentally_prove_that_the_world/
For some fun reading on ancient flat Earth comsmologies, see Dirk L. Couprie, When the Earth Was Flat: Studies in Ancient Greek and Chinese Cosmology, Springer 2018.