Christian Topography

The Christian Topography (Ancient Greek: Χριστιανικὴ Τοπογραφία, Latin: Topographia Christiana) is a 6th-century work, one of the earliest essays in scientific geography written by a Christian author. It was originally written as five books by Cosmas Indicopleustes and expanded to ten to twelve books around 550 AD.

While most of the Christians of the same period maintained that the Earth was a sphere the work advances the idea that the world is flat, and that the heavens form the shape of a box with a curved lid, and especially attacks the idea that the heavens were spherical and in motion, now known as the geocentric model of the universe. The author cites passages of scripture which he interprets originally in order to support his thesis, and attempts to argue down the idea of a spherical earth by stigmatizing it as "pagan". An early surviving reference to the work is by Patriarch Photios I of Constantinople in the 9th century AD. Photius condemns the style and syntax of the text as well as the honesty of the author. More recent authors tend to agree with Photius on the stylistic points, but do find the author generally reliable for geographical and historical references. Edward Gibbon, for example, said "the nonsense of the Monk was, nevertheless, mingled with the practical knowledge of the traveller" and used it in writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The Topography is often cited as evidence that Christianity introduced the idea of the flat-earth into the world, and brought in the age of ignorance. The latter pages of his work are devoted to rebutting the criticism of his fellow monks that what he was saying was wrong. He repeatedly denounces "those reprobate Christians who, ..., prefer, through their perverse folly or downright wickedness, to adopt the miserable Pagan belief that earth and heaven are spherical, and that there are Antipodes on whom the rain must fall up." Raymond Beazley, in the first volume of the The Dawn of Modern Geography (1897), said

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