[Alamo-Girl]

Rats, that should have read:

Aristarchus first proposed orbits in 150 B.C. but it was not taken seriously until Copernicus.

[Alamo-Girl]

To keep these dates in perspective, the Qumran (Dead Sea Scroll) fragments were copied 200-150 B.C. The date of the text from which they were copied is unknown.

Noah was Enoch's grandson and lived about 2350 B.C. (there are various dating methods)

[PatrickHenry]

Aristarchus first proposed orbits in 150 B.C. but it was not taken seriously until Copernicus.

There was also that amazingly complicated system of Ptolemy, with epicycles (which assumed a motionless earth). I think the reason that notion the earth might be orbiting the sun wasn't taken seriously was suggested in that website about Aristotle in one of my earlier posts. If we were in orbit (the thinking went), our position would shift greatly every six months, so we should (they thought) be able to see the apparent positions of the "fixed" stars shifting as our viewpoint changed. As we now know, the closest stars do indeed undergo a parallax shift, but it's tiny, and it requires a good telescope and photographic records to reveal this.