The Legacy of Taprobane

Taprobane is the name that ancient Greek geographers used for the island now called Sri Lanka, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. Arabs referred to it as Serendib, later European mapmakers called it Ceylon, and it officially became Sri Lanka in 1972.

Britannica notes that the island lies at a crossroads of sea routes across the Indian Ocean. Long before Europeans found an ocean route to India in the 15th century, it was known to Greek, Roman, Persian, Armenian, Arab, Malay and Chinese sailors. The name Taprobane reached Greek and Roman writers through contacts of this kind. What they wrote down is a record of how the Mediterranean world first heard of the island, and it mixes observation with hearsay.

The fullest surviving classical account is a chapter in the Natural History of the Roman author Pliny the Elder, a work the Library of Congress dates to AD 77. Pliny writes that Taprobane was long looked upon as another world, and that the age of Alexander the Great first gave proof that it was an island.

He then repeats earlier Greek reports. Onesicritus, the commander of Alexander's fleet, said that its elephants were larger and better suited to warfare than those of India. Megasthenes said that the island was divided by a river and produced more gold, and larger pearls, than India. Eratosthenes gave its size as seven thousand stadia in length and five thousand in breadth, with seven hundred villages and no cities. These are second-hand reports as Pliny passed them on.

Pliny adds a later story from the reign of the Emperor Claudius, which the Library of Congress gives as AD 41 to 54. A freedman of Annius Plocamus, who had contracted to collect the revenues of the Red Sea, was sailing around Arabia when a gale from the north carried him away. After fifteen days he drifted to Hippuros, a port of Taprobane, where the king received him kindly.

According to Pliny, the freedman learned the language in six months. The king noticed that the Roman coins he carried were all of equal weight, although they had been struck under several emperors, and decided to seek an alliance with Rome. He sent an embassy of four persons. They spoke of five hundred towns, a royal city beside a harbour facing south, carefully tilled land, and the high value placed on pearls and precious stones.

In AD 150 Claudius Ptolemy wrote his Geographia, a treatise that shaped the work of later geographers. The Library of Congress holds maps based on it, including one published in 1513, on which Taprobana appears as a very large island south of Asia.

The identity of the island was debated for centuries. The Library of Congress records that some writers took it for a phantom island, for Madagascar or for the southern end of India, while most geographers chose between Sumatra and Ceylon. The Italian traveller Ludovico di Varthema, who wrote in the early 16th century, stated that Taprobane was the island then called Sumatra. During the 17th century mapmakers sometimes labelled Ceylon as the island formerly named Taprobana, and a map by Nikolaas Visscher of Amsterdam says so in its title.

Sri Lankan chronicles offer a likely origin for the word. They describe a kingdom named Tambapanni, and Britannica places the landing of the first settlers in the chronicle account at Tambapanni, near Puttalam. The Library of Congress notes the theory that Taprobana was a Greek or Roman alteration of Tambapanni, and says that most historians today believe Taprobana was Sri Lanka.

Pliny's lifetime falls within what Britannica calls the Anuradhapura period, from the 3rd century BCE to the 10th century CE. UNESCO describes Anuradhapura as a political and religious capital that flourished for 1,300 years, and its remains were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1982. The later name Ceylon is still used occasionally for trade purposes, as Britannica notes. Sri Lanka's Export Development Board, for example, writes of Ceylon cinnamon.