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 only a man of substance and wealth could have produced, and it survives in three medieval copies. One, made in Constantinople in the ninth century, now resides in the Vatican library; two others were made in the eleventh century. The one from Cappadocia, deep in Asia Minor, has migrated to Sinai in Egypt; the one from Mount Athos, that monastic metropolis west of Constantinople, is in Florence’s Laurentian library. What they share is an abundance of illustrations, all going back to Cos- mas’s original, pictures that supplement the wonders he sought to describe in words. The Florentine manuscript bears the name Cosmas added in a later hand, so that’s what we call him, but most medieval readers knew him only as he wanted to be known: as “just a Christian,” anonymous and devout. His contemporaries, though, found anonymity to be precious and polemical, a sign of a man taking sides in the religious quarrels of the time A single piece of gleaming white marble.
Cosmas and his comrade were both sophisticated, experienced travelers, yet Adoulis still felt like the end of the earth to them. We can see instead that it was more accurately the center of the human universe; that when they were there, it was a cockfighting pit of geopolitical rivalry. The Himyarite realm lay not far away across the strait of Bab el Mandeb. At the narrowest point of the strait, just where it squeezed the passage down to the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea was no more than twenty miles wide, with an island midway across.
Himyar was an ancient land, variously contending for control with nearby Saba (the biblical Sheba) and with the Ethiopians across the water. From of old, the land there was fertile, its richness enhanced by the fabulous Marib dam, a third of a mile long and rising fifteen feet above water level, feeding a system of canals that ensured a regular, reliable water supply to the region. Inscriptions, not necessarily legendary, say it was built in the seventh century BCE, but the dam was undoubtedly renewed, expanded, and strengthened as time passed and craft grew. There was a serious dam break in 450 CE, and Cosmas may not have known when he wrote his story in the late 540s that another also occurred in 542. The last, and most catastrophic, occurred in 570, and with it came the end of agricultural prosperity and Himyarite domination.
Himyarite nation was still formidable
At the moment of Cosmas’s visit to Axum, however, the Himyarite nation was still formidable. Its kingdom was Jewish in a world where Christianity was more and more the officially sponsored religion, even at the fringes of empire. (To be fair, however, the label “Jewish” may overstate its resemblance to other communities that venerated the books of Moses.) In 518, one skirmish between Ethiopians and Himyarites led to something like a civil war between Christians and Jews in Yemen, during which there was an anti-Christian pogrom by the leader Yusuf Ashaar, nicknamed Dhu Nuwas (“the man with a ponytail”). He concluded the conflict with a massacre of Christians in Najran in the early 520s. One account alleged that Dhu Nuwas ordered 20,000 Christians thrown into pits of boiling oil for refusing to convert to Judaism. Under this man with the ponytail, the Himyarites savored a fleeting, doomed independence.
