What individual stated first that the earth was flat?

2 answers

His or her name has not been recorded. Undoubtedly most early people believed the earth was flat because that's how they perceived it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaximander

He is the first to have speculated the Earth is flat in writing, at least the writings we know about. He viewed the universe as a cylinder, with Earth being one end of the cylinder. By six hundred years later, around 4BC, few philosphers believed in the Flat Earth anymore.