between 1575-1580 CE. The
sphericity of the Earth was established by
Greek astronomy in the 3rd century BC, and the earliest terrestrial globe appeared from that period. The earliest known example is the one constructed by
Crates of Mallus in
Cilicia (now
Çukurova in modern-day Turkey), in the mid-2nd century BC. No terrestrial globes from Antiquity have survived. An example of a surviving
celestial globe is part of a Hellenistic sculpture, called the
Farnese Atlas, surviving in a 2nd-century AD Roman copy in the
Naples Archaeological Museum, Italy. Early terrestrial globes depicting the entirety of the
Old World were constructed in the
Islamic world. During the Middle Ages in Christian Europe, while there are writings alluding to the idea that the earth was spherical, no known attempts at making a globe took place before the fifteenth century. The earliest extant terrestrial globe was made in 1492 by
Martin Behaim (1459–1537) with help from the painter Georg Glockendon. Another early globe, the
Hunt–Lenox Globe, ca. 1510, is thought to be the source of the phrase
Hic Sunt Dracones, or "
Here be dragons". A similar
grapefruit-sized globe made from two halves of an
ostrich egg was found in 2012 and is believed to date from 1504. It may be the oldest globe to show the
New World. Stefaan Missine, who analyzed the globe for the Washington Map Society journal
Portolan, said it was "part of an important European collection for decades." After a year of research in which he consulted many experts, Missine concluded the Hunt–Lenox Globe was a
copper cast of the egg globe. The world's first seamless
celestial globe was built by
Mughal scientists under the patronage of
Jahangir.
Globus IMP, electro-mechanical devices including five-inch globes have been used in Soviet and Russian spacecraft from 1961 to 2002 as navigation instruments. In 2001, the
TMA version of the
Soyuz spacecraft replaced this instrument with a
digital map. ==Manufacture==