ch nonsense, the
worthy Cosmas cannot abide it.

[Footnote 316: Its title is [Greek: Christianon biblos,
hermeneia eis ten Oktateuchon], i. e. against Ptolemy's
Geography in eight books. The name Cosmas Indicopleustes seems
merely to mean "the cosmographer who has sailed to India." He
begins his book in a tone of extreme and somewhat unsavory
humility: [Greek: Anoigo ta mogilala kai bradyglossa cheile ho
hamartolos kai talas ego]--"I, the sinner and wretch, open my
stammering, stuttering lips," etc.--The book has been the
occasion of some injudicious excitement within the last half
century. Cosmas gave a description of some comparatively recent
inscriptions on the peninsula of Sinai, and because he could
not find anybody able to read them, he inferred that they must
be records of the Israelites on their passage through the
desert. (Compare the Dighton rock, above, p. 214.) Whether in
the sixth century of grace or in the nineteenth, your
unregenerate and unchastened antiquary snaps at conclusions as
a drowsy dog does at flies. Some years ago an English
clergyman, Charles Forster, started up the nonsense again, and
argued that these inscriptions might afford a clue to man's
primeval speech! Cf. Bunsen, _Christianity and Mankind_, vol.
iii. p. 231; Mueller and Donaldson, _History of Greek
Literature_, vol. iii. p. 353; Bury, _History of the Later
Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene_, vol. ii. p. 177.]

I cite these views of Cosmas because there can be no doubt that they
represent beliefs current among the general public until after the time
of Columbus,[317] in spite of the deference paid to Ptolemy's views by
the learned. Along with these cosmographical speculations, Cosmas shows
a wider geographical knowledge of Asia than any earlier writer. He gives
a good deal of interesting information about India and Ceylon, and has a
fairly correct idea of the position of China, which he calls Tzinista or
Chinistan. This land of silk is the remotest of all the Indies, and
beyond it "there is neither navigation nor inhabited country.... And the
Indian philosophers, called Brachmans, tell you that if you were to
stretch a straight cord from Tzinista through Persia to the Roman
territory, you would just divide the world in halves.