Cosmas, surnamed Indicopleustes, or the Indian Navigator, is the most important source on Axumite history. He is the only one who furnishes us with a written record of the initial process of unification and expansion of the Axumite empire, which enabled it to rank among the great powers of the late antiquity. The reason that this writer of the early medieval period came to be called Cosmas is because his surviving book is devoted to a description of the universe. He received his surname Indicopleustes (which means The Indian Navigator) from the fact that he sailed across the Indian ocean to India and Sri Lanka1.
It is believed that Cosmas was a native of Alexandria, and may have been of Greek parentage. Since the career he pursued in the earlier part of his life was trade and commerce, his formal education was limited to elementary subjects. Cosmas spent his youth engrossed in business and travelling abroad. Consequently, he was unable to attend higher institutions of learning. However, although he was not formally instructed, so inquisitive was his mind and so sharp his intellect, that he taught himself a knowledge of literature and science which raised him to the level of the culture of his time, and to his being accepted as a capable scholar and defender of the Christian religion.
Commercial pursuits led Cosmas into seas and countries very distant from his home. He sailed upon all the three best-known seas of his time: the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. He also sailed through the Indian Ocean, having visited India and Sri Lanka.
Moreover, he traversed on land the region which stretches southward from Egypt down toward the equator, and which he called Ethiopia. At the time, the capital of ancient Ethiopia was Aksum, an important centre of commerce, and also of religion and learning. It was one of the places which Cosmas, in line with his calling, visited, and from one or two of his statements we may infer that he was well received at Court, and was permitted by the King to travel freely throughout his dominions. As a result, he came to know about the source of the Abay or ‘Blue Nile, which a millennium afterwards was reached by the Portuguese Catholic missionaries, and then in 1769 by the Scottish traveller James Bruce.
Among the other parts of ancient Ethiopia which Cosmas visited we may include the Aromatic country— that great projection on the east of the African Continent which terminates in Cape Guardafui. He may also have proceeded to the north-west, and visited Meroe. There was still another interesting locality that the traveller tells us he saw, and it was the Desert of Sinai.
But more important for our purpose, Cosmas visited Adulis or Adule (which is the indigenous name, Adulis being the Greek rendition of the name) in the year 525 A.D. Adulis was then the seaport of the Axumite empire. Adule is located in the Northern Red Sea Region of the State of Eritrea, about 45 kilometers south of the port city of Mitsiwa. In those days, depending on the urgency of the march and the route chosen, it took from one to two weeks’ caravan journey from Adulis to the capital Aksum.
While Cosmas was in Adulis, the governor of the port-town, whose name was Abbas, received a written order from the Axumite Emperor Kaleb2. It directed him to take copies of Greek inscriptions that were made on a white marble chair and a basanite tablet, which were found close to each other at the Western entranceway to Adulis, and to forward the copies to him. The governor of Adulis in turn asked Cosmas and his friend whose name was Menas to perform the task of copying the inscriptions. Accordingly, Cosmas and his friend made two sets of copies of the Greek inscriptions. They gave the first set of the copies to the Governor of Adulis, and the second set of copies they kept to themselves since they wanted to know about the history and geography of the Axumite empire.
Cosmas, when all his travels were over, returned to his hometown Alexandria. Soon after, he became a monk. He devoted himself to the composition of works on descriptive geography, cosmography,3 and Scriptural exegesis. Of these, the Christian Topography4 alone is extant.
In his book The Christian Topography, Cosmas attempts to present a Christian explanation of the formation and configuration of the universe. He wrote it between 535 and 547 A.D. Although the views of Cosmas on cosmology have little merrit in them, being motivated by religious zeal rather than by scientific objectivity, his book ranks as the best work that contains more accurate and more valuable information on geographical subjects than any other document that had come down to us from the early medieval age. The historical records it carries about the Axumite empire have particularly no comparison.
It is in narrating his travel experiences that Cosmas is found at his best. He was a lover of knowledge, and when he was unable to visit places which lay in the vicinity of his route, he made inquiries about them from such persons as knew them and could be trusted to report things truly. The language he uses is simple, and his descriptions are not only remarkably vivid, but are, above all things, truthful. The more accurate knowledge now possessed of the remote regions which Cosmas visited goes all to show that the thought of tickling the fancy of his readers with tales of wonder had never entered his mind, but that on the contrary he was a man who had a supreme regard for truth, and who was at once an acute observer, and shrewd in judging the value of the information which he received from others.
Reference Notes
- Sri Lanka until the year 1972 AD was called Ceylon. ↩︎
- Emperor Kaleb ruled the Axumite empire from around 514 to 543 A.D. ↩︎
- Cosmography is the branch of science which deals with the general features of the universe. ↩︎
- The Christian Topography of Cosmas, An Egyptian Monk. Translated from the Greek, and Edited, with Notes and Introduction by J.W. McCrindle (1897). Printed at the Broford Press for Hakluyt Society: London. ↩︎