Sorry, the implication above being all hail Herodotus over Thucydides--they're often compared--the exacting historian and celebrant of the Peloponnesian War, favoured by posterity over Herodotus until the post-modern populist era.

Lexi,

"History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."

The other pertinent point here is that it's always been the "educated class" who have written it down - so in many cases it's a subjective version of past events.
And again, one is gets a differing angle depending on whether the version is couched from a macro or micro perspective.

Dear Poirot,

Good point. It's all subjective. The guys who wrote the Bible thought the world was flat.

where does the bible say the world to be flat
where does it say the earth is 7000 years old

seeme we attribute to loosly...things to the holy texts
trhat the messengers didnt put in...!

even then translations have subverted the true mmeanings
they werrnt ever to be written down..many reported by others..and
much written well after the fact[heavilly edited and rewritten]sure

but i dont recall the flat earther thing
nor the 7000 sun rotation cycles

Dear OUG,

I got these examples from the web. You can find more if you're interested in the topic - just Google - "flat earth bible."

Daniel 4:7-8. "I saw a tree of great height at the center of the world. It was large and strong, with it's top touching the heavens and it could be seen from the ends of the earth."

According to the web:

"This was allegedly an inspired dream, yet it conveys a flat-earth concept, because no matter how tall a tree would be, people on the other side of a spherical earth could not see it."

Matthew 4:8. "The devil took him (Jesus) to a very high mountain and displayed before him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence."

According to the web:

"The only reason for the "very high mountain" was that the altitude would make it possible to see to the ends of the earth. Only on a flat earth would this be remotely possible, so the New Testament writers were as ignorant as the Old."

Let's not forget that:

People of those times were ignorant of scientific facts - they thought the earth was flat, that sick people were possessed by demons and that essentially everything was caused by either gods or demons.

Lexi and OUG,

Your discussion made me wonder when it was first postulated that the earth was spherical.
Here's a little info on a Greek named Eratosthenes - although he wasn't the first to assume the earth was round.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes.

The other point, of course, is that even though this knowledge existed, it was confined to a relatively small group of people, and the route taken to wider dissemination is often convoluted before it reaches the minds of the general population