by Douglas Boin
In the non‐canonical Letter of Barnabas, written in the second century CE, the anonymous Christian writer uses the six days of creation, in the Book of Genesis, as a starting point for concocting his history of the earth. Adding a dash of the Psalms – “For a day in your courts is better/than a thousand [days] elsewhere,” Psalms 84.10–11 [NRSV] – the writer deduced that the present age would last six thousand years.
In and of itself, the countdown to six thousand posed no immediate or widespread concern because no one really knew how old the earth actually was. It could always be debated. By the mid‐third century CE, that would change. For one Christian, Hippolytus of Rome, the clock was perilously close to approaching the end. Hippolytus believed that Jesus had been born in the 5,500th year since the creation of the world, which left a balance of five hundred years before stoppage.
Like the writer of the Letter of Barnabas before him, Hippolytus did not arrive at this calculation based on scientific methods, like carbon dating any artifacts in the alleged tomb of Jesus, for example. Turning to the Jewish story of Moses in the desert, who made a tabernacle for Yahweh – “It shall be 2.5 cubits long, 1.5 cubits wide, and 1.5 cubits high,” Exodus 25.10 [NRSV] – Hippolytus used these raw numbers to date Jesus’ incarnation as the Messiah. Jesus must have been born in the 5,500th year of the world, he argued, because the measurements of Moses’ tabernacle added up to 5.5 (Hippolytus, Commentary on Daniel, fragment 2.5). So it was that Hippolytus, writing in the mid‐third century CE, concluded that the earth was two hundred years away from the end of time.
This mathematical, theological backstory may explain why some Christians in the sixth century CE believed the apocalypse was near. As the 550th year after Jesus’ birth approached, so, too, did panic about what would happen next – for those convinced of the accuracy of Hippolytus’ math. Agathias’ account of the earthquake in Constantinople is crucial evidence in this regard. It also raises an important question. How many Christians were embarrassed by these hysterical, end‐time speculations, and more importantly, did they do anything about it?
Scholars have not reached a consensus yet on whether the issue of when the world would end was as urgent as it may seem, but one piece of evidence suggests the people of the sixth century were trying to find ways to postpone it. One monk, Dionysius Exiguus (“Dionysius the Short”) would propose that Christians start counting time from the birth of Jesus, which Dionysius called year one in the “Year of our Lord” (Anno Domini) system. By resetting the world clock to 1 A.D. – in effect, by adding a period of “extra time” to the age of the world – Dionysius may have been at the forefront of a clever campaign to switch off people’s apocalyptic fears.
Religious minorities
The divergence of Christian opinion over how to read and interpret Jewish and Christian Scripture – seen throughout Justinian’s reign – is an important feature of Late Antique Christian society, but disagreement about scriptural interpretation is a phenomenon with an even longer history. Jewish and gentile followers of Jesus had been disagreeing about how to interpret Jewish Scripture since the earliest generation of the Jesus movement. The issue of whether Christians should read Jewish Scripture literally, however, is made all the more historically intriguing by the fact that Jews themselves had long been reading their own sacred texts in an allegorical way, too. Since at least the time of Philo, also a resident of Alexandria, in the first century BCE, Jews had been exploring allegorical reading of books, like Genesis, about the creation of the world.
Both Cosmas’ and Augustine’s peculiar understanding of how to read Jewish Scripture seems, then, strangely myopic, given the vibrant intellectual traditions which flourished in the Jewish community itself. When combined with the fact that, from the very top of Justinian’s Roman Empire, Jewish people were presumed to need Christian guidance to correct the “mistaken” way they interpreted their own scripture, it becomes clear that, for sixth‐century Jews throughout the Mediterranean, the Christian world was an acutely awkward one to participate in.
13.3 Beyond Rome’s Christian Empire in the Sixth Century CE
One last remarkable aspect of Cosmas’ writing is the breadth of his geographical knowledge. In fact, although he may seem in some regards to show a frustratingly narrow interest in the world outside the Bible, his text, the Christian Topography, is one of the most extraordinary testimonies of a Late Antique writer describing the world beyond the Mediterranean Sea (Political Issues 13.1: The Arab Client Kings of Sixth‐Century Persia and Rome).
Political Issues 13.1 The Arab Client Kings of Sixth‐Century Persia and Rome
Significantly, although neither the East Roman Empire nor the Sasanian Empire directly administered any of the land on the Arabian peninsula, the imperial presence of both was unavoidable there. By the sixth century CE, both empires had established informal treaties with local tribes in the north of the peninsula, in territories that bordered Persia and Rome.
In the northwest of the peninsula, southeast of the Roman province of Syria, Roman officials partnered with a politically talented family, the Jafnids, part of the Arabian tribe of Ghassan. This Arab‐Roman family governed their own kingdom but, as allies of the Roman emperor in Constantinople, contributed soldiers to the Roman army and provided a trustworthy buffer against any advances from Sasanians through this contested region.
In the northeast region of the peninsula, at the border of the Euphrates River, southwest of Persia, was located a second Arab kingdom. It was ruled by the Nasrids, a family culturally fluent in Persian customs who hailed from the Arabian tribe of Lakhm. These Persian‐Arab leaders played an important role governing their territory as a client state of the Sasanians. In this way, the Lakhmid kingdom also functioned as a buffer, protecting the Sasanians from Roman aggression.
Together, these two families, the Jafnids and the Nasrids – from two different tribes – effectively locked their partners, the Romans and the Sasanians, out of any control over the Arabian peninsula. This tense standoff affected life for many other people living on the peninsula. There were key routes and trading posts in the peninsula’s sometimes mountainous but overwhelmingly desert landscape, of course, which drew outsiders. But Roman and Persian merchants, both of whom were keen to cultivate connections to Asia, largely found ways to work around them. Romans used the Red Sea to sail around the Arabian peninsula. Sasanians, because of their control of overland roads to and from Asia, were also able to avoid leaving their footprints in the sands of the peninsula. (Cosmas had marveled at the Sasanians’ advantage in trade.)
A critical turning point in Roman–Sasanian relations would come in the sixth century, potentially upsetting long‐standing arrangements with these Arab client kings.
As Romans increasingly began to sail around Persia, taxes which had once trickled into the Sasanian treasury from overland travellers diminished. Whether for these reasons or to make a forceful response or perhaps because of aggressive measures devised in Constantinople, Sasanian Persians began, during the sixth century CE, to encroach on territory in the southern Arabian peninsula, in areas of modern Oman and Yemen.
The result of this Sasanian expansion was that, by the end of the sixth century, the two empires of Rome and Persia were not only facing each other across the Euphrates River border. They were meeting each other along sea routes on the south side of the Arabian peninsula. The people of the Arabian peninsula were now boxed in by strong imperial powers and, in the north, by the two family‐run states which had established political allegiances with them.
The word topography comes from the Greek roots topos (τóπος), meaning “place,” and the verb graphein (γραϕεῖν), “to write, or describe.” In his text, Cosmas describes the route that a traveler would take departing from Alexandria and journeying down the Red Sea. Along the western edges of the Red Sea, towards its southern end, a voyager would encounter the land of Axum, in modern Ethiopia. Axum, Cosmas tells us, was an important Christian kingdom on the south
ern border of the Roman Empire.
From the Red Sea, one could continue sailing along the southern shore of the Arabian peninsula, the territory where the countries of Yemen and Oman are located today. In Cosmas’ time, the southwestern tip of the Arabian peninsula was occupied by the kingdom of Himyar. It was the site of a thriving Jewish state until 525 CE when it was taken over by Axum’s Christian leaders. (For the details of the military attack against the “Homerites,” as Procopius called the people of Himyar, see Procopius’ History of the Wars 1.20.1–13.)
The further, eastern part of the Arabian peninsula entered into the orbit of the Sasanians, who, as traders and diligent administrators, oversaw ships coming into and out of the Persian Gulf. Cosmas must have been a fascinating tour guide, taking readers to far‐away lands which, to many Romans, had existed in a nebulous region of the world, at best. Here is one of Cosmas’ travel descriptions:
[There is a] country of silk situated in the remotest of all the Indies, and lies to the left of those who enter the Indian sea, far beyond the Persian Gulf and beyond the island called by the Indians Selediba and by the Greeks Taprobanē. This country is called Tzinista and is surrounded on the left by the ocean. … Indian philosophers, called the Brachmans, say that if you stretch a cord from Tzinista to pass through Persia, onward to the Roman dominions, the middle of the earth would be quite correctly traced. They are perhaps right; for the country in question [the land of silk] deflects considerably to the left, so that the loads of silk passing by land through one nation after another, reach Persia in a comparatively short time while the route by sea to Persia is vastly greater.
(Christian Topography 2.45, trans. by J. McCrindle [1897], slightly modified)
Cosmas offered this helpful guide to his readers so that they could make an efficient journey. Voyagers who went “by land from Tzinista to Persia,” as opposed to making the trip by boat, shortened “very considerably the length of the journey.” These written instructions were more than an imagined geography. When we replace Cosmas’ ancient place‐names with their modern counterparts, the global distance covered by this sixth‐century text becomes remarkable.
Taprobanē is, according to most scholars, the island of Sri Lanka; the Indian philosophers to whom Cosmas refers are likely a group of distinguished Hindu priests, the Brahmins; and Tzinista, the land of silk, is a reference to lands held by imperial China, an empire whose first dynasty, the Qin, ruled in the third century BCE. In this way, from the words of one sixth‐century writer who lived in Alexandria, the veil that had once shrouded the continent of Asia – clouding it in obscurity for many people who lived in the proudly cosmopolitan Roman world – begins to lift. We should seize this opportunity to see the expanding sixth‐century world from as many of their perspectives as possible.
13.4 Sixth‐ and Seventh‐Century South Asia
Sri Lanka and the economy of the Indian subcontinent
Much ancient evidence exists for contact between the people of continental Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Mediterranean, but it is often not highlighted in basic narratives of Greece or Rome. The unfortunate result is that students of the Mediterranean world may not be as familiar with it as they should. Examples of exchange between the Hellenistic rulers and the people in the territory of Bactria has already been discussed. For the Roman people, the classical Latin writer Pliny preserves one of the most telling encounters, which dates to the time of the Emperor Claudius (r. 41–54 CE).
A Roman administrator, a freed slave in charge of collecting taxes in the Red Sea region, had set sail into the Arabian gulf – his destination is unclear – but an unexpectedly strong wind blew him off course. The Roman official landed in Taprobanē, Sri Lanka, where a group of ambassadors received him. Eventually, four of the ambassadors would travel back to Emperor Claudius’ court in Rome. From their accounts, Pliny learned about the government, trade, and beliefs of the people of the distant island. They were ruled by a king, had an expensive local marble that resembled tortoise shell, worshipped a deity whom Pliny equated to Hercules, and, unlike the people of the ancient Mediterranean, did not practice or endorse the institution of slavery (Pliny the Elder, Natural History 6.24).
Pliny’s first‐century account of the people of Sri Lanka is important, even if it is a piece of far‐removed, second‐hand testimony. Archaeological evidence, by contrast, has allowed scholars a closer glimpse of life on the island. Nautical archaeologists, working at the modern fishing town of Godavaya, have studied the site of a shipwreck dating to the first century BCE–first century CE, that is, generally, to the period the Sri Lankan ambassadors were sent to Rome.
The Godavaya site is the oldest known shipwreck in the Indian Ocean, and the remains of the wreckage there confirm Sri Lanka’s central position in a system of trade that brought goods from India, the inland regions of Gandhara (see Chapter 1), and China. Among the raw materials found in the submerged ship were bars of copper, iron, and ingots of glass. There were also stones with inscriptions on them in a Middle Indo‐Aryan language of ancient India, called Prakrit, related to Sanskrit. Other examples of Prakrit have been found, on stone, at cities in Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
As we will see in a moment, these inscriptions, which date to the third century BCE, are critical documents, not the least because they help us understand the spread of Buddhism. For now, it is important to stress that the same language used by Buddhist individuals in the third‐century BCE subcontinent was found on stones in the first‐century Godavaya shipwreck. Language and ideas, not just objects and luxury goods, were a vital part of Sri Lanka’s interconnected world in South Asia.
“Buddhism” and “Hinduism”
We set foot in this region, the northern Kabul valley near the Indus River, at the outset of our book. Specifically, we looked at the ways in which Hellenistic Greeks, in the decades following Alexander’s conquests, influenced local residents in Bactria, an ancient kingdom comprising parts of modern Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. By the second century CE, a community of monks here had incorporated Hellenistic, Parthian, and Sasanian artistic traditions of sculpting figures out of stone to depict a spiritual leader who was important to their community: the “Enlightened One,” or Buddha. One Buddhist community, in Mathura, northern India, created a larger‐than‐life sandstone portrait bust of the Buddha in the early fifth century CE (Figure 13.3). Other communities, like the Buddhist monks at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, carved giant statues of the Buddha directly from the cliffs.
Figure 13.3 The Gupta Empire ruled northern India from the early fourth century through mid‐sixth century CE. This portrait of the Buddha (“Enlightened One”) was carved during the Gupta period, c.430–435 CE. It comes from the city of Mathura, about 90 miles southeast of the modern Indian capital, Delhi. Larger than life size, it was made from sandstone and is one of several representations of the Buddha from South Asia and the Indian continent that date to Late Antiquity. Some of these were truly monumental, such as those produced in the adjacent Ghandara kingdom. Many pilgrims and tourists intrigued by the story of the Buddha came to these cities and left records of their journey. During the Gupta period, in particular, one Chinese writer, Faxian, turned his experiences into a book, A History of the Buddhistic Kingdoms. It was published in the early fifth century CE. From Uttar Pradesh, Mathura. Carved from pink granite. Measurements: 50 x 30 x 38 cm (c.19.6 in. tall x 11.8 in. wide x 15 in. deep). Now in the collection of the Musée Guimet (Musée national des arts asiatiques), Paris (Inventory number MA 5029).
Photo credit: Ravaux. © RMN‐Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.
Since the exchange of ideas, practices, and values between people of different cultural backgrounds is a phenomenon that takes place in two directions, it is worth rewinding our story here to see how the people of this region of ancient Asia influenced the myriad soldiers, settlers, and traders who had come from the ancient Mediterranean.
Looking at the economic system t
hat linked Sri Lanka to the Indian subcontinent and beyond is one way of doing so. Another way would be to investigate individual and communal beliefs and values, how they were expressed in local settings, and how they spread beyond the confines of the communities themselves.
The Buddhas at Bamiyan and the portrait head from Mathura give us an excellent opportunity to discuss the historical development of what we now call “Buddhism” and the social world of the Indus River valley out of which it emerged. Like so many of the religions encountered in Mediterranean antiquity –“Christianity” and “Judaism,” in particular – “Buddhism” as a name of a distinct “religion” was not a term that the monks at Bamiyan would have been familiar with. The word was coined by nineteenth‐century Christians who were struggling to describe sets of beliefs that were entirely foreign to them. The word “Hinduism,” an umbrella term used to describe the diverse beliefs and practices associated with the people east of the Indus River, was invented during the nineteenth century, too. We can use these words as modern shorthands as long as we understand that, for the people of Late Antique Central Asia and India, their self‐perception and self‐description would have been slightly different.
The history of Buddhism and Hinduism are intertwined. Hinduism is the more ancient of the two, with sets of sacred writings, the Vedas, which date to c.1000 BCE. These texts are a collection of prayers, hymns, rituals, and philosophical reflections, the latter of which are known as the Upanishads. Together, the Vedas describe a world of many gods and set forth the “order,” or dharma, that should rule one’s behavior. Starting from the very earliest period of Hindu history, the interpretation of these texts and how they applied to the Hindu rituals was controlled by a select group of priests known as brahmans. These are likely the figures Cosmas alludes to in the sixth century as “Indian philosophers.”
