Cosmas Indicopleustes copies the inscriptions of Adulis

Cosmas tells the story himself. At Adulis, beside the road to Aksum, stood a marble throne covered with Greek writing and, behind it, a stone tablet bearing another inscription. When he was in the country — “some five and twenty years ago, more or less, at the beginning of the reign of the Roman Emperor Justinus” — King Elesbaan (Kaleb), who was about to set out against the Homerites across the gulf, wrote to the governor of Adulis, Abbas, asking for copies. The governor turned to Cosmas and another merchant, Menas, who later became a monk at Raithu; the two copied both texts and kept copies for themselves.

The tablet recorded the conquests of the Ptolemaic king Ptolemy III Euergetes (3rd century BC), while the throne bore the Greek inscription of an unnamed Aksumite king of the 3rd century AD, listing his campaigns in Africa and across the Red Sea; Cosmas took the second text for the continuation of the first. Neither monument has been found, and the copy preserved in the Topography is the earliest surviving record of Aksum’s conquests. The date of the visit is uncertain: “the beginning of Justin’s reign” points to about 518 and Kaleb’s first Arabian expedition, while others date it to about 525, on the eve of the great expedition.

The Christian Topography set out to refute the spherical earth of Ptolemy and the Greek astronomers with a flat world shaped like the Tabernacle of Moses — a view that contemporary Christian scholars such as John Philoponus rejected. Its value lies elsewhere. Cosmas, a follower of the Church of the East and a pupil of the future patriarch Mar Aba, describes the trade of Adulis and Aksum, the churches of Persian Christians in Sri Lanka, on the Malabar coast and on Socotra, and the silk that came from China; he is the first Greek writer known to have heard of a sea east of China. A Church Slavonic translation of the book was known in Rus by the 14th century.