Within the Arab community
Within the Arab community, there were more settled and prosperous tribes, reaching out into the more intractable desert, marginal desert dwell- ers—forerunners of the...
Merchants like Cosmas also knew
Merchants like Cosmas also knew their way around land, since by definition the commodities that shipped best were also easy to carry ashore and...
Monastic metropolis west of Constantinople
Cosmas returned to Alexandria to write his stories, and that’s why we know of him. Christian Topography, his lavish illustrated book, is something that...
Alexandrian called John Philoponos
We have a good idea what Cosmas was attacking—that is, what drove him to say such ridiculous things. The leading philosopher in Alexandria was...
THE VIEW FROM ALEXANDRIA
The Alexandria that Cosmas and Philoponos knew as a home of mer¬chants, philosophers, monks, and more had been a place of civilization,
contention, and shortsightedness...
Gupta empire in India was deteriorating
Closer at hand, the Gupta empire in India was deteriorating, but the states that succeeded it were, if less coherently gathered together, doubtless more...
Mesopotamia is the heart of modern Iraq
Mesopotamia is the heart of modern Iraq. The lands to its east over the Zagros Mountains—the highlands of classical Persia and modern Iran— are...
Destroyed by a Mamluk sultan in the thirteenth century
In Cosmas’s day, the prosperity of that world was enough to make a businessman’s mouth water. Gaza on the Mediterranean coast was already a...
When Sopatros the Roman
Cosmas tells a story from that end of the world going back to his own early days, around 515 CE, when Sopatros the Roman,...
Just a Christian
He, “just a Christian,” as he described himself, was shocked by the existence of “false Christians” who did not understand how the world isconstructed,...
