Does the phrase "The empire on which the sun never sets" predate knowledge that the world is round?

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Does the phrase “The empire on which the sun never sets” predate knowledge that the world is round?

Absolutely not.

The fact that the Earth is (approximately) a sphere has been known since antiquity. As the American historian Stephen Jay Gould observed in his paper The Late Birth of a Flat Earth:

There never was a period of “flat earth darkness” among scholars (regardless of how many uneducated people may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology

The myth of the flat Earth is actually a relatively modern phenomenon. The idea was popularised by (among others) Washington Irving, author of Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow .

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Source: stackoverflow.com

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Does the phrase "The empire on which the sun never sets" predate knowledge that the world is round?

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