Excerpt from The Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes For the suggestion of this particular author I hardly know whether I am most indebted to Prof. Heiberg of Copenhagen, from whom the suggestion originally came, or to Monsieur Seymour de Ricci, who passed it on to me, and whose friendship enlivened days spent in collating a text, which even the most ardent admirers of Cosmas - if there are any such - must admit is not exhilarating as a whole. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Volume 98 of the Hakluyt Society publications (1897) describes voyages to South Asia in the mid-sixth century C.E.

New study of the Christian Topography, a sixth-century illustrated treatise, and its intellectual milieu.

This is the first modern language translation of the entire text of the tenth-century Greek Book of Ceremonies (De ceremoniis), a work compiled and edited by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII (905-959). It preserves material from the fifth century through to the 960s. Chapters deal with diverse subjects of concern to the emperor including the role of the court, secular and ecclesiastical ceremonies, processions within the Palace and through Constantinople to its churches, the imperial tombs, embassies, banquets and dress, the role of the demes, hippodrome festivals with chariot races, imperial appointments, the hierarchy of the Byzantine administration, the equipping of expeditions, including to recover Crete from the Arabs, and the lists of ecclesiastical provinces and bishoprics.