556 



COSMOS. 



geography. He remarks, " that in nis time the empire of 

 the Romans and Parthians had attended the sphere of the 

 known world more even than Alexander's campaigns, from 

 which Eratosthenes derived so much aid." The Indian trade 

 was no longer in the hands of the Arabs alone, and Strabo, when 

 in Egypt, remarked with astonishment the increased number 

 of vessels passing directly from Myos Hormos to India.* In 

 imagination he penetrated beyond India as far as the eastern 

 shores of Asia. At this point, in the parallel of the Pillars of 

 Hercules and the island of Rhodes, where, according to his idea, 

 a connected mountain chain, a prolongation of the Taurus, tra- 

 versed the Old Continent in its greatest width, he conjectured 

 the existence of another continent between the west of Europe 

 and Asia. " It is very possible,'* he Avrites,f " that in the same 



* Strabo, lib. i. p. 14; lib. ii. p. 118; lib. xvi. p. 781; lib. xvii. pp. 

 789 and 815. 



+ Compare the two passages of Strabo, lib. i. p. 65, and lib. ii. p. 118 

 (Humboldt, Examen critique de I' Hist, de la Geographic, t, i. pp. 152- 

 154). In the important new edition of Strabo, published by Gustav 

 Kramer, 1844, th. i. p. 100, "the parallel of Athens is read for the 

 parallel of Thinse, as if Thinse had first been named in the Pseudo- 

 Arrian, in the Periplus Maris Eubri." Dodwell places the Peri- 

 plus under Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Yerus, whilst according 

 to Letronne, it was written under Septimius Severus and Caracalla. 

 Although five passages in Strabo, according to all our manuscripts, have 

 Thince, yet lib. ii. pp. 79, 86, 87, and above all 82, in which Eratosthenes 

 himself is named, prove decidedly that the reading should be the 

 " parallel of Athens and Rhodes." These two places were confounded, 

 as old geographers made the peninsula of Attica extend too far towards 

 the south. It would also appear surprising, supposing the usual reading 

 Qiv&v KVK\OQ to be the more correct, that a particular parallel, the Dia- 

 phragm of Dicsearchus, should be called after a place so little known as 

 that of the Sines (Tsin). However, Cosmas Indicopleustes also connects 

 his Tzinitza (Thinse) with the chain of mountains which divides Persia and 

 the Romanic districts no less than the whole habitable world into two 

 parts, subjoining the remarkable observation, that this division is, accord- 

 ing to the " belief of the Indian philosophers and Brahmins." Compare 

 Cosmas, in Montfaucon, Collect, nova Patrum., t. ii. p. 137; and my 

 Asie centrale, t, i. pp. xxiii. 120-129, and 194-203, t. ii. p. 413. Cosmas 

 and the Pseudo-Arrian, Agathemeros, according to the learned investiga- 

 tions of Professor Franz, decidedly ascribe to the metropolis of the Sines, 

 a high northern latitude (nearly in the parallel of Rhodes and Athens) ; 

 whilst Ptolemy, misled by the accounts of mariners, has no knowledge 

 except of a Things three degrees south of the equator (Geogr., i. 17). I 

 conjecture that Thinse merely meant generally, a Chinese emporium, a 



