Concept · Greek & Arabic island names
Taprobanā and Serendib
Sri Lanka as named from outside twice over. Taprobanā is the Greek and Roman rendering of Tāmraparṇī, and on Ptolemy’s map it is drawn fourteen times too large and pushed onto the equator, which is how classical geography got the Indian Ocean wrong for a thousand years. Serendib is the Arabic, from Sanskrit Siṃhaladvīpa, and it is what Arab pilots called the island they used to fix their run across the bay.
- Function
- Cosmology & sacred geography
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
Serendib gave English a word. Horace Walpole coined serendipity in 1754 after a Persian tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes keep finding things they were not looking for — so an Arabic corruption of a Sanskrit island-name is now the standard English term for a lucky accident in research.
The size and position of Taprobanā on Ptolemy’s map are so far out that some scholars have argued he meant Sumatra. The usual reading is that he meant Sri Lanka and had bad numbers.
Connections (2)
- Alternative toLankā / Sri Lanka
The same island under three sets of eyes. Lankā is the Ramayana’s and the island’s own; Taprobanā is the Greek, from Tāmraparṇī, drawn vastly too large on Ptolemy’s map; Serendib is the Arab pilots’ name for the landfall that fixed their crossing. Sri Lanka is the one place in this repository that can be read from India, from the Mediterranean and from the Gulf at the same time.
- AnalogueTenjiku
A country as imagined from a long way off, and wrong in opposite directions. Tenjiku was India known to Japan only as the source of the Law, never visited and never doubted. Taprobanā was Sri Lanka known to the Mediterranean as a place on the maps, visited by traders and still drawn fourteen times too large on the equator. One error came from reverence and the other from arithmetic.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Taprobana”, “Serendip” and “Names of Sri Lanka”; Ptolemy’s Geography.
Open Taprobanā and Serendib in the repository →