53. Gr. e0pi\ th_n e0swte/ran 'Indi/an . Literally "Inner India". This generally means that part of India which lies on the further side of Cape Comorin or of the Straits between Ceylon and the mainland. But as the name of India was sometimes applied to Southern Arabia, and even to Eastern Africa, India as lying beyond these countries may be here meant. John Malela, or Malala, the Byzantine historian, who wrote not long after the time of Cosmas, calls both of them India: "At this time it happened that the Indians warred against each other, those called Auxumites with those called Homerites. . . . The Roman traders go through the Homerites into Auxume, and to the interior Kingdoms of the Indians, for there are seven Kingdoms of the Indians and Ethiopians." Friar Jornandes calls Eastern Africa India Tertia.
54. The size of these birds, and the fact afterwards mentioned that they kept flying aloft, might indicate them to be albatrosses.
55. Virgil ( Georg., I, 11. 233 seq. ) gives poetical expression to the same idea: "High as the globe rises towards Scythia and the pinnacles of Rhipaean hills, so deep is its downward slope to Libya and its southern clime. The one pole ever stands towering above our heads; the other is thrust down beneath the feet of murky Styx and her abyssmal spectres."----Conington's Transl.
56. Gr. a1nw pou tre/xwn . Cosmas here annihilates his own objection to the doctrine of Antipodes. Rain could as easily fall up to them as the Nile could run up to the sea.
57. Gr. a)po_ e0rh&mwn o)re/wn . Psalm LXXV. v. 6. The Revised Version translates the verse thus: "For neither from the east, nor from the west, nor yet from the south, cometh lifting up;" giving in the margin: "from the wilderness of mountains cometh judgement."
58. Montfaucon has here this note: "Cosmas thought that in the northern parts of the earth there existed a very lofty mountain of a conical shape which the sun always went round; and that night was produced in this earth by the shadow of the mountain, while the sun was traversing that part of his orbit which is turned away from us." See, in the Appendix, the figure of the mountain as sketched by Cosmas.
59. Eccl. i, 5, 6.
60. The Revised Version, however, attributes the making of a circuit to the wind as well as to the sun.
61. Cosmas extends the name of tropics to the points at which the sun turns northward from the Equator on the 21st of March, and southward from it on the 21st of September.
62. Gr. Kuma&tion strepto_n ku&klw| .
63. Gen. v, 29.
64. Gen. iii, 17.
65. Gen. ix, 3.
66. Gen. iv, 3.
67. Deut, xxx, 12.
68. Baruch, iii, 29.
69. Gr. meta&cion ----sometimes written mata&cion ----a foreign word, and only found in later Greek. In classical Greek the name for silk is bo&mbuc , and also shriko_n , from which our word silk is derived by the change, which is not uncommon, of r into l . The Seres from whom it was procured inhabited Northern China, whence it was conveyed by various land routes to the nations of the west. Southern China, again, which Cosmas calls Tzinitza, was inhabited by the Sinae , who sent their products by sea to Ceylon and India, and other countries farther west. Full details as to the commodities which China in ancient times exported and imported, as well as to the trade routes by which they were conveyed, will be found in the late Dr. De Lacouperie's great work, The Western Origin of Chinese Civilization. It was in the days of Cosmas that the silk-worm was for the first time introduced into Europe. Gibbon, in the fortieth chapter of The Decline and Fall , presents us with an admirable account of the silk trade up till the time of the Emperor Justinian, and of the far-reaching effects upon commerce which eventually resulted from the receipt by that emperor of eggs of the silk-worm which had been surreptitiously conveyed to him from China.
70. Montfaucon has the following note here: " Selediba is written afterwards Sielediba. It is the island Ceylan, the name being so far changed. For diba, or diva, means 'island'; hence Maldive, just as Sielediva, signifies the island Siele. Tzinitza, immediately below, in the Vatican copy is read Tzknê (Tzinê?) Tsina, or Sina, namely; the country of the Sinae, which, as Cosmas himself attests, is bounded by the ocean on the east." In Book xi Cosmas gives at some length an account of this island, and in one of the notes to that book the etymology of these names is examined.
71. "A valuable merchandise of small bulk is capable of defraying the expense of land carriage; and the caravans traversed the whole latitude of Asia in two hundred and forty-three days, from the Chinese Ocean to the sea-coast of Syria. Silk was immediately delivered to the Romans by the Persian caravans, who frequented the fairs of Armenia and Nisibis.....To escape the Tartar robbers and the tyrants of Persia, the silk caravans explored a more southern road; they traversed the mountains of Thibet, descended the streams of the Ganges or the Indus, and patiently expected, in the ports of Guzerat and Malabar, the annual fleets of the West."----Gibbons, Decline and Fall, c. xl.
72. The Persian Gulf has a length of 650 English miles, while the distance from Ceylon to the Malacca peninsula only is nearly twice that distance.
73. Not very far short of 2,000 miles.
74. Gr. w(j a)po_ sparti/ou o)rqw~j . . . tij metrw~n . Eratosthenes estimated the breadth of the habitable world from the parallel of Thule (which he took to coincide with the Arctic Circle) to Sennaar, at 38,000 stadia, and its length, from the westernmost point of Gaul to furthest India, at 77,800, thus making its length about double its breadth.
75. monai/ , mansions or halting-places.
76. Gr. Iouui/a . So the Florentine copy, while the Vatican has ou)nni/a in a second hand. This would mean the country of the Huns, concerning whom sec note to Book XI.
77. Nisibis, the capital of Mygdonia, was, after the time of Lucullus, considered the chief bulwark of the Roman power in the East. It was an ancient, large, and populous city, and was for long the great northern emporium of the commerce of the East and West. It was situated about two days' journey from the head waters of the Tigris in the midst of a pleasant and fertile plain at the foot of Mount Masius. The Seleucia here referred to was situated on the Tigris about 40 miles to the north-east of Babylon, from the ruins of which it was mainly constructed: just as, afterwards, its own ruins served to build Ctesiphon. Next to Alexandria, it was the greatest emporium of commerce in the East.