He had also indicated the extent of the knowledge of the...

He had also indicated the extent of the knowledge of the Romans about the land and people of Arabia. Describing Gellus' expedition in 25 B. C. to Haura on the Red Sea coast to the borders of Hadramaut, Strabo says that the Emperor Augustus was also influenced by reports of the wealth of the Arabs and their trading activity in spices, aromatics, and precious stones, and that he desired either to befriend or subdue such opulent people.[^1] By the third century A. D.

distinct changes had taken place in the political, cultural, and religious spheres. The Roman Empire came near to utter break­down. The legions, never too many for the long frontiers and made increasingly heterogeneous by local recruiting, lost their sense of mutual cohesion and failed to check stronger outside attacks. Many emperors rose and fell like ninepins, un-mourned, unsung. Rome was sacked by Goths in 410 A.D. By the middle of the sixth century A.

D., Justinian's final efforts at consolidation of the Roman power had failed. The commencement of the middle Ages is important in the history of science in general and geography in particular. A general retrogression is witnessed and gradually the so-called “Dark Age” of geography set in. It is common to begin the middle Ages from Constantine, but Paganism was tolerated almost until the division of the Roman Empire in 395A.D.

The tradition of pagan literature and science, however, continued much longer, at least until Justinian closed the school of Athens. The triumph of Chris­tianity led its adherents to consider scientific research not only a useless occupation but also a pernicious one.

Alexandria had lost its noble place as the center of scientific activity, and Egypt for the Christians had become a land of new wonders as the first home of hermits or desert men or monks; some visitors had no interest in anything else and dismissed the pyramids as mere “Granaries of the Kings.”[^2] A sailor turned monk took a hand at geographical writing and produced the crankiest of books, the famous Christian Topo­graphy, in 547 A.D.

The main purpose of this erudition was to disprove the pagan notion that the earth is a globe. Cosmas hailed from Alexandria and had in his younger days traded in the Red Sea and even beyond. Cosmas' earth was flat, rectangular, and oblong, twice as long from east to west as from north to south, and was surrounded by ocean.