Cosma Indicopleustes

Cosmas Indicopleustes (; also known as Cosmas the Monk) was a merchant and later hermit from Alexandria in Egypt. He was a 6th-century traveller who made several voyages to India during the reign of emperor Justinian. His work '' Christian Topography'' contained some of the earliest and most famous world maps.''Encyclopædia Britannica'', 2008, O.Ed, Cosmas Indicopleustes.
Cosmas was a pupil of the East Syriac Patriarch Aba I and was himself a follower of the Church of the East.

Voyage

Around AD 550, while a monk in the retirement of a Sinai cloister, Cosmas wrote the once-copiously illustrated '' Christian Topography'', a work partly based on his personal experiences as a merchant on the Red Sea and Indian Ocean in the early 6th century. His description of India and Ceylon during the 6th century is invaluable to historians. Cosmas seems to have personally visited the Kingdom of Axum in modern day northern Ethiopia, as well as Eritrea. He sailed along the coast of Socotra, but it cannot be ascertained that he really visited India and Ceylon.

''Indicopleustes''

"Indicopleustes" means "Indian voyager", from "(I) sail". While it is known from classical literature, especially the '' Periplus Maris Erythraei'', that there had been trade between the Roman Empire and India from the first century BC onwards, Cosmas's report is one of the few from individuals who had actually made the journey. He described and sketched some of what he saw in his ''Topography''. Some of these have been copied into the existing manuscripts, the oldest dating to the 9th century. In 522 AD, he mentions several ports of trade on the Malabar Coast (South India). He is the first traveller to mention Soriyani Christians in present-day Kerala in India. He wrote:

"Even in Taprobane, an island in Further India, where the Indian sea is, there is a Church of Christians, with clergy and a body of believers, but I know not whether there be any Christians in the parts beyond it. In the country called Malê, where the pepper grows, there is also a church, and at another place called Calliana there is moreover a bishop, who is appointed from Persia. In the island, again, called the Island of Dioscoridês, which is situated in the same Indian sea, and where the inhabitants speak Greek, having been originally colonists sent thither by the Ptolemies who succeeded Alexander the Macedonian, there are clergy who receive their ordination in Persia, and are sent on to the island, and there is also a multitude of Christians. ��The island f Sri Lankahas also a church of Persian Christians who have settled there, and a Presbyter who is appointed from Persia, and a Deacon and a complete ecclesiastical ritual. But the natives and their kings are heathens."

''Christian Topography''

A major feature of his '' Christian Topography'' is his worldview that the surface of ocean and earth is flat (that is, nonconvex and nonspherical, as perceived by the human senses) and that the heavens form the shape of a box with a curved lid. He was scornful of Ptolemy and others who held that the world's surface was, contrary to human perceptual experience, a spherical shape. Cosmas aimed to prove that pre-Christian geographers had been wrong in asserting that the surface of the earth and surface of the ocean was convex and spherical in shape, and that it was in fact modelled on the tabernacle, the house of worship described to Moses by God during the Jewish Exodus from Egypt. In the centre of the plane is the inhabited earth, surrounded by ocean, beyond which lies the paradise of Adam. The sun revolves round a conical mountain to the north: round the summit in summer, round the base in winter, which accounts for the difference in the length of the day.

However, his idea that the surface of the ocean and earth is nonspherical had been a minority view among educated Western opinion since the 3rd century BC. Cosmas's view was never influential even in religious circles; a near-contemporary Christian, John Philoponus, sought to refute him in his '' De opificio mundi'' as did many Christian philosophers of the era.

David C. Lindberg asserts:

Cosmas was mentioned in Umberto Eco's historical novel, ''Baudolino''. In the book, a Byzantine priest and spy, Zozimas of Chalcedon, refers to his world topography as the key to finding the mythical Prester John:

Cosmology aside, Cosmas proves to be an interesting and reliable guide, providing a window into a world that has since disappeared. He happened to be in Adulis on the Red Sea Coast of modern Eritrea at the time (c. AD 525) when the King of Axum was preparing a military expedition to attack the Jewish king Dhu Nuwas in Yemen, who had recently been persecuting Christians. On request of the Axumite king and in preparation for this campaign, he recorded now-vanished inscriptions such as the Monumentum Adulitanum which he mistook for a continuation of another monument detailing Ptolemy III Euergetes's conquests in Asia. Neither have been located by archeologists. Allusions in the Topography suggest that Cosmas was also the author of a larger cosmography, a treatise on the motions of the stars, and commentaries on the Psalms and Canticles.

See also

* Chronology of European exploration of Asia

References

Further reading

* Kenneth Willis Clark collection of Greek Manuscripts: Cosmas Indicopleustes, ''Topographia''.
* Cosmas Indicopleustes, ed. John Watson McCrindle (1897)
''The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk''
Hakluyt Society. (Reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2010. )
* Cosmas Indicopleustes, Eric Otto Winstedt (1909). ''The Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes''. The University Press
* Jeffrey Burton Russell (1997). ''Inventing the Flat Earth''. Praeger Press
* Dr. Jerry H Bentley (2005). ''Traditions and Encounters''. McGraw Hill.
* Schneider, Horst (2011). ''Kosmas Indikopleustes, Christliche Topographie. Textkritische Analysen. Übersetzung. Kommentar.'' Turnhout: Brepols.
* Wanda Wolska-Conus. ''La topographie chrétienne de Cosmas Indicopleustes: théologie et sciences au VIe siècle'' Vol. 3, Bibliothèque Byzantine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962.
* Cosmas Indicopleustes. ''Cosmas Indicopleustès, Topographie chrétienne.'' Translated by Wanda Wolska-Conus. 3 vols. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1968–1973.

External links

The Christian Topography
by Cosmas Indicopleustes

by Cosmas Indicopleustes (other site)

*[https://archive.today/20150419140638/http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.gr.699/0001/thumbs?sid=093d29441ce90fbfec1f878486263cd3%23current_page Scan of the entire Codex Vat.gr.699 on Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana website]

''This article uses text taken from the Preface to th
Online English translation of the Christian Topography
which is in the public domain.''

{{Authority control

Byzantine geographers
Explorers of Asia
Church of the East writers
6th-century Byzantine monks
6th-century Byzantine writers
Greek explorers
6th-century Byzantine scientists
Flat Earth proponents
6th-century geographers
Explorers of South Asia
Monks of the Church of the East