Cosmas Indicopleustès

Cosmas Indicopleustès (“ the traveller of the Indies ”, sometimes called Cosmas of Alexandria) is a merchant traveller and Greek Géographe originating in Alexandria. He made at the 6th century several maritime tours which led it in Red Sea, with the Persian Gulf, in Ethiopia and perhaps until India and with the Sri Lanka.

At a certain time of its life, it entered like Moine an orthodoxe monastery of the the Sinai. It is there that it wrote a curious work entitled Christian Topographie , in which it describes the Ground like a plane surface resting on water and enchased in the skies as in a gate vault of the Old Testament. It would seem that he wanted, by being based on drawn ideas that and there in the Bible and by calling upon the reasoning more than with its experiment of traveller, to refute the “pagan” observations of Ptolémée on the sphericity of the world (see Figure of the Earth to the Middle Ages).

Although its book was prone to many mockeries, it does not contain of them less passages worthy of interest, such as its notes on Zanzibar and the Indian Ocean like its Observation S on the commercial relations between the Abyssinie and the interior of the African continent or between the Egypt and the Orient. Also Cosmas Indicopleustès is he the first Western author to give further information on the pepper plant and its Culture. The most famous part of its work contains a description, perhaps of second hand, Flore and fauna of the India and Sri Lanka.

There exist two Manuscrit S of the Christian Topographie , dating from the 9th century, preserved one with Florence, the other with the the Vatican. The first complete edition, accompanied by a Translation in Latin, date of 1707 (published by Bernard de Montfaucon). First translation in French figure in the work of Edouard Charton, old and modern Travellers , appeared in 1858.

Cosmas Indicopleustès is also the author of four works now lost on the Astronomie and the Cosmographie, like on the Cantiques and the Psaumes.

See too

Figure of the Earth to the Middle Ages
World (universe)

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