King Alfred and India

Illustration of pepper trees, accompanying the text of Cosmas Indicopleustes’s sixth-century Christian Topography in Codex Sinaiticus graecus 1186, fol. 202v, eleventh century, probably from Cappadocia, now at St. Katherine’s monastery, Sinai; the text associated with it is translated as follows in Faller 2011: ‘This is a picture of the tree which produces pepper. Faller suggests that both the image and text are ‘so detailed and accurate that personal inspection and experience are almost a certainty’ (image: Faller 2011, used under the CC BY 3.0 licence specified by the Journal of Transcultural Studies).

Source: www.caitlingreen.org