The Periplus Calls The Island Very Large, But Desolate; ...
The
inhabitants were few, and dwelt on the north side.
They were of foreign
origin, being a mixture of Arabs, Indians, and Greeks, who had come
thither in search of gain.... The island was under the king of the Incense
Country.... Traders came from Muza (near Mocha) and sometimes from
Limyrica and Barygaza (Malabar and Guzerat), bringing rice, wheat, and
Indian muslins, with female slaves, which had a ready sale. Cosmas (6th
century) says there was in the island a bishop, appointed from Persia. The
inhabitants spoke Greek, having been originally settled there by the
Ptolemies. "There are clergy there also, ordained and sent from Persia to
minister among the people of the island, and a multitude of Christians. We
sailed past the island, but did not land. I met, however, with people from
it who were on their way to Ethiopia, and they spoke Greek."
The ecclesiastical historian Nicephorus Callistus seems to allude to the
people of Socotra, when he says that among the nations visited by the
missionary Theophilus, in the time of Constantius, were "the Assyrians on
the verge of the outer ocean towards the East ... whom Alexander the
Great, after driving them from Syria, sent thither to settle, and to this
day they keep their mother tongue, though all of the blackest, through the
power of the sun's rays." The Arab voyagers of the 9th century say that
the island was colonised with Greeks by Alexander the Great, in order to
promote the culture of the Socotrine aloes; when the other Greeks adopted
Christianity these did likewise, and they had continued to retain their
profession of it. The colonising by Alexander is probably a fable, but
invented to account for facts.
[Edrisi says (Jaubert's transl. pp. 47, seqq.) that the chief produce
of Socotra is aloes, and that most of the inhabitants of this island are
Christians; for this reason: when Alexander had subjugated Porus, his
master Aristotle gave him the advice to seek after the island producing
aloes; after his conquest of India, Alexander remembered the advice, and
on his return journey from the Sea of India to the Sea of Oman, he stopped
at Socotra, which he greatly admired for its fertility and the
pleasantness of its climate. Acting on the advice of Aristotle, Alexander
removed the inhabitants from their island, and established in their place
a colony of Ionians, to whom he entrusted the care of cultivating aloes.
These Greeks were converted when the Christian religion was preached to
them, and their descendants have remained Christians. - H.C.]
In the list of the metropolitan Sees of the Nestorian Church we find one
called Kotrobah, which is supposed to stand for Socotra. According to
Edrisi, Kotrobah was an island inhabited by Christians; he speaks of
Socotra separately, but no island suits his description of Kotrobah but
Socotra itself; and I suspect that we have here geography in duplicate, no
uncommon circumstance. There is an epistle extant from the Nestorian
Patriarch Jesujabus (A.D. 650-660), ad Episcopos Catarensium, which
Assemani interprets of the Christians in Socotra and the adjacent coasts
of Arabia (III.
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