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It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat. A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere. Although there were a few dissenters--Leukippos and Demokritos for example--by the time of Eratosthenes (3 c. BC), followed by Crates(2 c. BC), Strabo (3 c. BC), and Ptolemy (first c. AD), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans.
and it reminded me of these old exchanges including a desinformation answer
about the non existence of the "flat earth" believers of the past. . .
However, two scholars, Arthur Beer, an astrophysicist and historian of German science at Cambridge, and Bruno Weber, the curator of rare books at the Zürich central library, have independently traced the illustration back to Camille Flammarion’s popular science book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire from 1888.
An inaccurate, late 19th century, assessment of the midieval world view. As the quote I provided says, the vast majority of educated people have known for a very long time that the world is round.
Second, the illustration is famous on account of its rich symbolism which is taken to represent the mediaeval world-view.