Names of Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka (; ), officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an island country in the northern Indian Ocean which has been known under various names over time.

At the outset of the 6th century BC, Sri Lanka was known as ''Silam'',Cosmas (Indicopleustes),
''The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk: Translated from the Greek, and Edited with Notes and Introduction'', Hakluyt Society, 1897, p. 363 J. W. McCrindle, Hakluyt Society, ''Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society'', B. Franklin, Volume 98, 1897 from the Pali ''Sihalam'' (or ''Simhalam'',J. Dodiya, ''Critical Perspectives on the Rāmāyaṇa'', Sarup & Sons, 2001, p. 166-181 ''Sihalan'',Henry Yule, A. C. Burnell, ''Hobson-Jobson : The Anglo-Indian Dictionary'', 1903 ''Sihala''S. K. Aiyangar, ''Some Contributions of South India to Indian Culture'', Asian Educational Services, 1995); became ''Saylan'' from the 9th century,R. A. Donkin, ''Beyond Price: Pearls and Pearl-fishing, Origins to the Age of Discoveries'', American Philosophical Society, 1998 which was transcribed as ''Ceilão'' by the Portuguese in 1505; and later as ''Ceylon'' in English. ''Ceylon'' was used until it was replaced by ''Sri Lanka'' in 1972; the honorific '' Sri'' has been added to ''Lanka'', a place mentioned in ancient texts and assumed to refer to the country between the 10th and the 12th centuries CE.

Other ancient names used to refer to Sri Lanka included ''Serendip'' in Persian, Turkic (Serendib/Särändib) and Eelam in Tamil. In the 19th century, it was said that the oldest recorded name of Sri Lanka was ''Tamraparni''. (= ''Taprobane'').

From 6th century BCE to 9th century CE : ''Silam, Sihala, Sailan''

At the outset of the 6th century BC, Sri Lanka was known as ''Silam'', from the Pali ''Sihalam''(or ''Simhalam'', ''Sihalan'', ''Sihala''). ''Silam'' was transliterated as ''Sinhale'' in Sinhala,M. M. M. Mahroof, ''An Ethnological Survey of the Muslims of Sri Lanka: From Earliest Times to Independence'', Sir Razik Fareed Foundation, 1986, p. XVI and ''Ilam'' in Tamil (from ''Silam'' without the initial sibilant).

In the Dīpavaṃsa (the Buddhist oldest historical record of Sri Lanka, 3rd to 4th century CE), it is written that "The island of Lanka was formerly called Sihala". ''Sihala'' means ''lion's abode''(from ''Siha'' = ''lion'')

In the 2nd century CE, Ptolemy called the inhabitants of the island ''Salai''. ''Salai'' derives from ''Sihalam'' (pronounced ''Silam'').

In Chinese sources, the Buddhist monk Faxian (3rd and 4th century CE) called the island the ''Lion Kingdom'' (師子國) or ''Sinhala'',J. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire (1860), ''Le Bouddha et sa religion'', page 321 while the 7th century monk Yijing also used the term ''Lion country'' (師子洲). Xuanzang called the country ''Sengjialuo'' (僧伽羅) for ''Sinhala'' in ''Records of the Western Regions''. Lengjia (楞伽) for Lanka was also used.

Cosmas Indicopleustes (6th century CE) named it ''Σιελεδίβα'' : ''Sielediba'' or ''SieleDiva'' (''Diva'', ''Dwipa'' meaning ''Island''). ''Siele'' also derives from ''Sihalam''. In the 9th century, the forms ''Sailan'' and ''Saylan'' were used.

''Taprobana, Tamraparni''

''Tamraparni'' is said to be the oldest recorded name of Sri Lanka, for example as asserted by Robert Caldwell. According to some legends, ''Tamraparni'' is the name given by Prince Vijaya when he arrived on the island. The word can be translated as "copper-coloured leaf", from the words Thamiram (copper in Sanskrit) and Varni (colour). Another scholar states that ''Tamara'' means red and ''parani'' means tree, therefore it could mean "tree with red leaves". Tamraparni is also a name of Tirunelveli, the capital of the Pandyan kingdom in Tamil Nadu. The name was adopted in Pali as ''Tambaparni''.

The name was adopted into Greek as ''Taprobana'', used by Megasthenes in the 4th century BC. The Greek name was adopted in medieval Irish (''Lebor Gabála Érenn'') as ''Deprofane'' (Recension 2) and ''Tibra Faine'' (Recension 3), off the coast of India, supposedly one of the countries where the Milesians / Gaels, ancestors of today's Irish, had sojourned in their previous migrations.

The name remained in use in early modern Europe, alongside the Persianate ''Serendip'',
with ''Traprobana'' mentioned in the first strophe of the Portuguese national epic poem ''Os Lusíadas'' by Luís de Camões.

John Milton borrowed this for his epic poem ''Paradise Lost'' and Miguel de Cervantes mentions a fantastic ''Trapobana'' in ''Don Quixote''.Don Quixote, Volume I, Chapter 18: ''the mighty emperor Alifanfaron, lord of the great isle of Trapobana''.

Some sources also identify Taprobane with Sumatra.

From 9th century to 15th century CE : ''Sailan'', ''Saylan'', ''Silan'', ''Seilan''

From ''Silam'' came the names :
* ''Sailan'' and ''Saylan'', mentioned on the 9th century CE,
* ''Ilam'' in Tamil),
* ''Siyalan'' and ''Silan'' (mentioned on the 10th century CE), etc.

Marco Polo, in 1298 CE, names it ''Seilan''. In the Chinese Mao Kun map (17th century but believed to date from the early 15th century), the name appears as ''Xilan'' (锡闌), also ''Xilan'' (細蘭) in the 13th century Chinese work '' Zhu Fan Zhi''.

During the 13th and 14th centuries, the forms ''Sailan'', ''Sílán'', ''Sillan'', and ''Seyllan'', were used

From the 16th century : ''Ceilão'', ''Lanka''; ''Zeylan'', ''Ceylon''

With the Portuguese colonization in the 16th century, the original local names ''Silam'', ''Sihala'' and ''Sailan'' were adopted as ''Ceilão'' in Portuguese (from 1505), and later as ''Zeilan'' or ''Zeylan'' in Dutch, and ''Ceylon'' in English. After independence in 1948, the name ''Ceylon'' was still used until 1972.

''Lanka'' appears later and in parallel, between the 10thDr. Deborah de Koning, PhD (2022), ''"Ravanisation": The Revitalisation of Ravana among Sinhalese Buddhists in Post-War Sri Lanka'', LIT Verlag, Münster, pages 108–110 and the 12th centuries CE. The name ''Lanka'', a Sanskrit word, comes from the Hindu text the ''Ramayana'', where ''Lanka'' is the abode of King Ravana.

The ''Ramayana'' ''Lanka'' began to be considered as the present-day ''Sri Lanka'' between the 10th and the 12th centuries CE. Then from the 16th century, in opposition to colonization, the assertion that the ''Ramayana'' ''Lanka'' was the present-day ''Sri Lanka'' became part of the Sinhalese Buddhist mythology, and started to be used by locals in opposition to the Portuguese colonial name ''Ceilão''.

''Sri Lanka''

The name of ''Sri Lanka'' was introduced by the Marxist Lanka Sama Samaja Party founded in 1935.

The Sanskrit honorific '' Sri'' was introduced in the name of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party () founded in 1952.

In 1972, the Republic of Sri Lanka was officially adopted as the country's name with the new constitution and changed to "Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka" in the constitution of 1978.

Other names

''Serendip''

The names ''Serendip'', ''Seren-dip'', ''Sarandib'' or ''Sarandīp'' are Persian and Arab or Hindustani names for Sri Lanka suggested to have been derived from the words ''Sinhala-dvipa'' (Sinhala Isle, ''dvipa'' or ''dipa'' means ''Island''), or ''Suvarna-dvipa'' meaning "golden-isle". Another proposal suggested the Tamil '' Cheran'' (a Tamil tribe) and ''tivu'' (island) as the origin. The English word "serendipity" was coined from Serendip.

''Lakdiva''

Another traditional Sinhala name for Sri Lanka was ''Lakdiva'', with ''diva'' also meaning "island". A further traditional name is ''Lakbima''. In both cases, ''Lak'' is derived from ''Lanka''. The same name could have been adopted in Tamil as ''Ilangai''; the Tamil language commonly adds "i" before initial "l".

''Eelam''

The earliest use of the word is found in a Tamil-Brahmi inscription as well as in the Sangam literature. The Tirupparankunram inscription found near Madurai in Tamil Nadu and dated on palaeographical grounds to the 1st century BCE, refers to a person as a householder from Eelam (''Eela-kudumpikan'').

The most favoured explanation derives it from a word for the spurge (palm tree), via the application to a caste of toddy-drawers, i.e. workers drawing the sap from palm trees for the production of palm wine.
The name of the palm tree may conversely be derived from the name of the caste of toddy drawers, known as ''Eelavar'', cognate with the name of Kerala, from the name of the Chera dynasty, via ''Cheralam'', ''Chera'', ''Sera'' and ''Kera''.M. Ramachandran, Irāman̲ Mativāṇan̲ (1991). ''The spring of the Indus civilisation''. Prasanna Pathippagam, pp. 34. "Srilanka was known as "Cerantivu' (island of the Cera kings) in those days. The seal has two lines. The line above contains three signs in Indus script and the line below contains three alphabets in the ancient Tamil script known as Tamil ...

The stem ''Eela'' is found in Prakrit inscriptions dated to 2nd century BC in Sri Lanka in personal names such as ''Eela-Vrata/Ela-Bharat'' and ''Eela-Naga''. The meaning of ''Eela'' in these inscriptions is unknown although one could deduce that they are either from ''Eela'' a geographic location or were an ethnic group known as ''Eela''.p. 313 From the 19th century onwards, sources appeared in South India regarding a legendary origin for caste of toddy drawers known as ''Eelavar'' in the state of Kerala. These legends stated that ''Eelavar'' were originally from Eelam.

There have also been proposals of deriving ''Eelam'' from ''Simhala'' (comes from Elam, Ilam, Tamil, Helmand River, Himalayas). Robert Caldwell (1875), following Hermann Gundert, cited the word as an example of the omission of initial sibilants in the adoption of Indo-Aryan words into Dravidian languages. The University of Madras Tamil Lexicon, compiled between 1924 and 1936, follows this view. Peter Schalk (2004) has argued against this, showing that the application of ''Eelam'' in an ethnic sense arises only in the early modern period, and was limited to the caste of " toddy drawers" until the medieval period..

Thomas Burrow, in contrast, argued that the word was likely to have been Dravidian in origin, on the basis that Tamil and Malayalam "hardly ever substitute (Retroflex approximant) 'ɻ' peculiarly Dravidian sound, for Sanskrit -'l'-." He suggests that the name "Eelam" came from the Dravidian word "Eelam" (or Cilam) meaning "toddy", referring to the palm trees in Sri Lanka, and later absorbed into Indo-Aryan languages. This, he says, is also likely to have been the source for the Pali '"Sihala". The Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, which was jointly edited by Thomas Burrow and Murray Emeneau, marks the Indo-Aryan etymology with a question mark.

Suggested Biblical names

*Tarshish. According to James Emerson Tennent, Galle was said to be the ancient city of Tarshish where King Solomon drew ivory, peacocks, and others. Cinnamon was exported from Sri Lanka as early as 1400 BC and as the root of the word cinnamon itself is Hebrew, Galle may have been the port of entry for the spice.
*Ophir. There is a Jewish tradition that associates the land of Ophir with modern-day India and Sri Lanka. David ben Abraham al-Fasi, a 10th-century lexicographer, cites Ophir as Serendip, as the country was known to the Persians.

See also

* Sri Lankan place name etymology

References

External links

{{Countries and languages lists

Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka