manufacture very fine buckrams and other cloths of cotton.
There is no more to say on the subject; so now let us go forward and tell
you of the province of Aden.
NOTE 1.--_Abash_ (Abasce) is a close enough representation of the Arabic
_Habsh_ or _Habash_, i.e. Abyssinia. He gives as an alternative title
_Middle_ India. I am not aware that the term India is applied to Abyssinia
by any Oriental (Arabic or Persian) writer, and one feels curious to know
where our Traveller got the appellation. We find nearly the same
application of the term in Benjamin of Tudela:
"Eight days from thence is Middle India, which is Aden, and in Scripture
Eden in Thelasar. This country is very mountainous, and contains many
independent Jews who are not subject to the power of the Gentiles, but
possess cities and fortresses on the summits of the mountains, from whence
they descend into the country of Maatum, with which they are at war.
Maatum, called also Nubia, is a Christian kingdom and the inhabitants are
called Nubians," etc. (p. 117). Here the Rabbi seems to transfer Aden to
the west of the Red Sea (as Polo also seems to do in this chapter); for
the Jews warring against Nubian Christians must be sought in the Falasha
strongholds among the mountains of Abyssinia. His Middle India is
therefore the same as Polo's or nearly so. In Jordanus, as already
mentioned, we have _India Tertia_, which combines some characters of
Abyssinia and Zanjibar, but is distinguished from the Ethiopia of Prester
John, which adjoins it.
But for the occurrence of the name in R. Benjamin I should have supposed
the use of it to have been of European origin and current at most among
Oriental Christians and Frank merchants. The _European_ confusion of India
and Ethiopia comes down from Virgil's time, who brings the Nile from
India. And Servius (4th century) commenting on a more ambiguous passage--
--"_Sola India nigrum
Fert ebenum_,"
says explicitly "_Indiam omnem plagam Aethiopiae accipimus_." Procopius
brings the Nile into Egypt [Greek: ex Indon]; and the Ecclesiastical
Historians Sozomen and Socrates (I take these citations, like the last,
from Ludolf), in relating the conversion of the Abyssinians by Frumentius,
speak of them only as of the [Greek: Indon ton endotero], "Interior
Indians," a phrase intended to imply _remoter_, but which might perhaps
give rise to the term _Middle India_. Thus Cosmas says of China: "[Greek:
aes endotero], there is
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