Geocentric model work, the "Almagest", was the culmination of centuries of work by Hellenic, Hellenistic and Babylonian astronomers. For over a millennium European and Islamic astronomers assumed it was the correct cosmological model. Because of its influence, people sometimes wrongly think the Ptolemaic system is identical with the geocentric model. Ptolemy argued that the Earth was a sphere in the center of the universe, from the simple observation that half the stars were above the horizon and half were below the horizon at any time (stars on rotating stellar sphere), and the assumption that the stars were all at some modest distance
Hottentot (racial term) "hodmandod" in the years around 1700. The reduced Afrikaans/Dutch form "hotnot" has also been borrowed into South African English as an offensive term for black people. In seventeenth-century Dutch, "Hottentot" was at times used to denote all black people (synonymously with "Kaffir"), but at least some speakers were careful to use the term "Hottentot" to denote what they thought of as a race distinct from the supposedly darker-skinned "Kaffirs". This distinction between the non-Bantu "Cape Blacks" and the Bantu was noted as early as 1684 by French anthropologist François Bernier. The idea that "Hottentot" referred strictly to the non-Bantu peoples