How did the ancient peoples imagine the universe?

For a long time, the Earth was considered the center of the Universe. The ancient Indians believed that the Earth was flat and rests on the backs of giant elephants, which, in turn, rest on a turtle. A huge turtle stands on a snake, which personifies the sky and, as it were, closes the earthly space. The ancient Jews lived on a plain, and the Earth seemed to them to be a plain, on which mountains rose here and there. They assigned a special place to the winds. Winds lived in the lower zone of the sky and separated the Earth from the heavenly waters. There were waters under the Earth that fed seas and rivers. The ancient Egyptians presented the world differently. In their opinion, below is the Earth, above it is the goddess of the sky; Aleva and on the right – the ship of the Sun God showing the path of the Sun across the sky from sunrise to sunset. The ancient Greeks envisioned the Earth as a convex disk. The land is washed from all sides by the Ocean River. Above the Earth is a copper firmament, along which the Sun moves.