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Updated: May 2, 2025
His new friend had himself been a merchant in the Indian trade, but had given up business because he was not successful in it; and, having taken a priest as his companion, had set out on the same voyage in search of Eastern wisdom. They had sailed to Adule on the Abyssinian shore, and then travelled to Auxum, the capital of that country.
The trade was lately turned more strongly into this channel because a war had sprung up between the two tribes of Jewish Arabs, the Hexumitæ of Abyssinia on the coast of the Red Sea near Adule, and the Homeritæ who dwelt in Arabia on the opposite coast, at the southern end of the Red Sea.
John, who returned with the ambassadors and became bishop of the Hexumitae. It was possibly this conquest of the Homeritae by Hadad, King of the Hexumitae, which was recorded on the monument of Adule, at the foot of the inscription set up eight centuries earlier by Ptolemy Euergetes. The monument is a throne of white marble.
Some modern travellers have confounded it with Adule or Adulis, the port of Axum, founded by fugitive Egyptian slaves. The Arabs were probably the earliest colonists of this coast. Even the Sawahil people retain a tradition that their forefathers originated in the south of Arabia.
This valuable inscription, which tells us of snowy mountains within the tropics, was copied by Cosmas, a merchant of Alexandria, who passed through Adule on his way to India.
He arrived in safety at Adule, the port on the Red Sea in latitude 15°, now known as Zula, where he made acquaintance with Moses, the bishop of that city, and persuaded him to join him in his distant and difficult voyage.
From Adule the two set sail in one of the vessels employed in the Indian trade; but they were unable to accomplish their purpose, and Palladius returned to Egypt worn out with heat and fatigue, having scarcely touched the shores of India.
It was while he was preparing his forces for this invasion that Cosmas, the Alexandrian traveller, passed through Adule; and he copied for the King of Auxum the inscription above spoken of, which recorded the victories of his predecessor over the enemies he was himself preparing to attack. The invasion by Elesbæs, or Elesthæus as he is also named, was immediately successful.
Nonnosus landed at Adule on the Abyssinian coast, and then travelled inward for fifteen days to Auxum, the capital. This country was then called Ethiopia; it had gained the name which before belonged to the valley of the Nile between Egypt and Meroë. On his way to Auxum, he saw troops of wild elephants, to the number, as he supposed, of five thousand.
When he writes as a traveller about the Christian churches of India and Ceylon, and the inscriptions which he copied at Adule in Abyssinia, everything that he tells us is valuable; but when he reasons as a monk, the case is sadly changed. He is of the dogmatical school which forbids all inquiry as heretical.
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