Or, better yet, we could save ourselves a lot of time and simply look up SHAMAYIM/HASHAMAYIM in a Hebrew lexicon and discover that it didn’t necessarily mean what you think it means. “Under the sky” is simply a description of human experience under the dome which the peoples of the Ancient Near East assumed “covered” the disk of land which extended to the horizon in all directions. (It is typically described in textbooks as an upside-down bowl covering a dinner plate.) HASHAMAYIM doesn’t imply something which extended to the entire atmosphere of planet earth or somehow carried a global meaning.
I’m usually the one who encourages people not to underestimate ancient peoples but in this case you are pontificating without any evidence to support your claim.
Oh my. I can’t help but think that (1) you’ve never consulted a lexicon for the meaning of the word circumnavigate, and that (2) you’ve never actually read the Sargon of Akkade birth legend, or else you would know that he only spoke of circumnavigating (sailing around) the “sea-lands.”
Here is the relevant text:
Let him ascend all the high mountains!
27. [Let him traverse all the foothills]!
28. Let him circumnavigate the sealands three times!
29. [Let Dilmun submit to him (?)]!
30. [Let him ascend to the Great Wall of Heaven and Earth (?)]!
31. [Let him remove (its) stones . . .]!
If memory serves, that text comes from a cuneiform in the British Museum. Notice that much of it is difficult to read, and therefore most of the translation is in square brackets. But line 28 is not in brackets because it is fairly clear: “Let him circumnavigate the sea-lands three times.”
Nothing is said about “circumnavigating the globe” as you claim. There is no mention of a globe or spherical planet earth at all. It should not be surprising that so many of the ancients realized that no matter what direction they travelled on land, they would eventually reach a coast. So they could also easily imagine circumnavigating — sailing completely around — that land mass and any islands in those waters.
Circumnagivation can be applied to circumnavigating the entire planet as Magellan did but it also applies to circumnavigating the Mediterranean Sea (visiting many of the key ports along the way) and circumnavigating the islands of Japans as submarines did during WWII.
Yes, you have totally misrepresented what the Sargon of Akkade text says. Some claim that the Vikings were the first to circumnavigate Great Britain. Would you thereby claim that the Vikings circumnavigated the globe?
Explain it? Ancient kings and their fans boasted about all sorts of things. (Indeed, ancient mythology is full of such boasts.) However, I have never heard anyone claim that lies and exaggerations were stated only once while those which were repeated four times must have been actual events observed by others. I am dumbfounded by this claim. (Do I really need to dispute this? Did ancient kings truly care if their boasts had been observed? Even present day politicians make boasts about incredible deeds which have never been observed! Some of them even claim to be better experts than the scientists. But that’s another topic for another day.)