IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Cathay and the Way Thither : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES. clxix
the marches at thirty miles each. And the measurement will run thus : From Tzinitza to the frontier of PERSIA, including all UNNIA and INDIA, and the Land of the Bactrians, will be about a hundred and fifty marches, if not more, certainly not less. The whole of Persia will be eighty marches. From Nisibis to Seleucia thirteen marches. From Seleucia by ROME and the GAULS and IBERIA (the country of those who are nowadays called Spaniards), to Outer GADES on the Ocean a hundred and fifty marches and more. So the total of the distances will be four hundred marches, more or less.
"No*, as regards the earth's latitude. From the far north to Byzan - tium will not be more than fifty marches (for we may form a good guess at the extent of those northern regions, both inhabited and uninhabited, from the position of the Caspian Sea which is a gulf of the ocean). From Byzantium again to Alexandria is fifty marches. From Alexandria to the Cataracts thirty marches. From the Cataracts to Axum thirty marches. From Axum to the projecting part of Ethiopia, the country where the incense grows, and which is called Barbary,2 lying along the Ocean, and including the territory of SAS which is the remotest part of Ethiopia, and is anything but a narrow tract of country, indeed quite the reverse, fifty marches, more or less. So that we may take the whole breadth at two hundred marches, more or less. And thus we see that the Holy Scripture speaks the truth when it puts the length of the earth at double its breadth : ` For thou shalt make the Table (which is, as it were, a pattern of the Earth) in length two cubits, and in breadth one cubit.'
"Now, the country where the incense grows lies in the projecting parts of Ethiopia, being itself indeed an inland region, but having the ocean on the other side of it. Hence the people of Barbary, being in the vicinity, are able to visit the interior for trading purposes, and bring back with them many kinds of aromatics, such as incense, cassia, calamus, and a great variety of others, and these again they carry by sea to Adule and Homerite, and to Further India and to Persia. And this is just as you will find it written in the Book of Kings, where the Queen of Saba, i.e., of Homerite (and whom again in the Gospels the Lord terms the Queen of the South) brings to Solomon aromatics from this very Barbary (she residing hard by on the coast just opposite), and brings him also staves of ebony, and monkeys, and gold from Ethiopia, the whole of Ethiopia being in fact quite in her vicinity and just across the
I suppose there is here to be understood a comparison of the Caspian, regarded as a gulf, with the Red Sea or Persian Gulf, and a deduction that the Ocean cannot lie further north from the innermost point of the Caspian than it lies south of the innermost point of one of those gulfs.
The modern Somali country. The name of Barbary is still retained in that of Berberah on the coast over against Aden. See also Ptolemy
i,
17.
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