Christian Topography

Geography work by Cosmas Indicopleustes (c. 550)

The Christian Topography (Χριστιανικὴ Τοπογραφία, Topographia Christiana) is a 6th century work, one of the earliest essays in scientific geography written by a Christian author. It originally consisted of five books written by Cosmas Indicopleustes and expanded to ten and eventually to twelve books at around 550 AD. While most of the Christians of the same period maintained that the Earth was a sphere, the work advances the idea that the world is flat, and that the heavens form the shape of a box with a curved lid, and especially attacks the idea that the heavens were spherical and in motion, now known as the geocentric model of the universe. The author cites passages from the Christians' scriptures which he interprets originally in order to support his thesis, and attempts to argue down the idea of a spherical Earth by stigmatizing it as "pagan". An early surviving reference to the work is by Patriarch Photios I of Constantinople in the 9th century AD. Photius condemns the style and syntax of the text as well as the honesty of the author. More recent authors tend to agree with Photius on the stylistic points, but to find the work generally reliable for geographical and historical references. Edward Gibbon, for example, said "the nonsense of the Monk was, nevertheless, mingled with the practical knowledge of the traveller" and used it in writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Besides the cosmological elements of the book, Christian Topography provides insight into the geographical knowledge of Byzantium, it is also the only Greek work with both text and illustrations surviving from the 6th century. "Indicopleustes" means "The one who has sailed to India". While it is known from classical literature that there had been trade between the Roman Empire and India, Cosmas was one of the individuals who had actually made the journey. Indeed, we learn from his book that he had travelled over much of the Red Sea coast, and as far as modern Sri Lanka. He described and sketched some of what he saw in his Topography. Some of these have been copied into the existing manuscripts. When not expounding his cosmology, Cosmas proves to be an interesting and reliable guide, providing a window into a world that has since disappeared. He happened to be in Ethiopia when the King of Axum was preparing a 522 or 525 AD military expedition to attack Jewish Arabs in Yemen. He recorded now vanished inscriptions such as the Monumentum Adulitanum (which he mistakenly attributed to Ptolemy III Euergetes).

Three nearly complete manuscripts are known to exist. The earliest and best is from the 9th century, and is in the Vatican Library. This text has only ten books. Two closely related manuscripts of the 11th century, one from the Saint Catherine's Monastery and the other probably originally from the Iviron monastery of Mount Athos, contain twelve books and comment on the prophets in the same order that Theodore of Mopsuestia preferred rather than in Septuagint order as in the copy from the Vatican Library. One of the contemporaries of Cosmas, John Philoponus, wrote a refutation of his work in his De opificio mundi (On the Creation of the World).