The European Confusion Of India And Ethiopia Comes Down From Virgil's Time, Who Brings The Nile From India.

And Servius (4th century) commenting on a more ambiguous passage -

- "Sola India nigrum Fert ebenum,"

says explicitly "Indiam omnem plagam Aethiopiae accipimus." Procopius brings the Nile into Egypt [Greek: ex Indon]; and the Ecclesiastical Historians Sozomen and Socrates (I take these citations, like the last, from Ludolf), in relating the conversion of the Abyssinians by Frumentius, speak of them only as of the [Greek: Indon ton endotero], "Interior Indians," a phrase intended to imply remoter, but which might perhaps give rise to the term Middle India. Thus Cosmas says of China: "[Greek: aes endotero], there is no other country"; and Nicolo Conti calls the Chinese Interiores Indi, which Mr. Winter Jones misrenders "natives of Central India."[1] St. Epiphanius (end of 4th century) says India was formerly divided into nine kingdoms, viz., those of the (1) Alabastri, (2) Homeritae, (3) Azumiti, and Dulites, (4) Bugaei, (5) Taiani, (6) Isabeni, and so on, several of which are manifestly provinces subject to Abyssinia.[2] Roger Bacon speaks of the "Ethiopes de Nubia et ultimi illi qui vocantur Indi, propter approximationem ad Indiam." The term India Minor is applied to some Ethiopic region in a letter which Matthew Paris gives under 1237. And this confusion which prevailed more or less till the 16th century was at the bottom of that other confusion, whatever be its exact history, between Prester John in remote Asia, and Prester John in Abyssinia.

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