Place · ancient Lankan port city · Sri Lanka
Galle
Also known as Gimanthota, Gimhathiththa
Galle on the southern tip of Sri Lanka is the island's oldest continuously used natural harbour, in use as a trading port from Anuradhapura-era antiquity through the Arab and Chinese maritime phases and into the Portuguese (1505), Dutch (1640) and British (1796) periods. Ptolemy maps a port at this latitude in the 2nd century CE under the name Gimanthota, and some scholars identify Galle with the Biblical Tarshish from which Solomon's fleet sought peacocks, ivory and spices. The town rose to prominence as the loading point from which cinnamon from Sri Lanka's central-hill forests was shipped west to the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea — making it one end of the classical cinnamon trade memorialised in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. The Dutch rebuilt the earlier Portuguese fortifications in 1663 into the Galle Fort that still stands at the harbour entrance; the fort was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 6.053, 80.221
Connections (2)
- Trade routeMosylon / Bosaso
The two ends of the classical cinnamon trade. Cinnamon grew only in Sri Lanka’s central-hill forests and the Malabar coast; Lankan sailors loaded it at Galle and shipped it west on the monsoon to Mosylon on the Horn of Africa, where Somali and Arab merchants resold it to Alexandria and Rome as a Horn-of-Africa product (the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, c.40-70 CE, calls it “Mosylitic cinnamon”). To stop Mediterranean captains from sailing past and finding the real source, the middlemen circulated the giant cinnamologus-bird myth Herodotus had already repeated in the 5th century BCE — the birds built nests of cinnamon sticks on inaccessible cliffs, lured down only by chunks of ox-carcass. The fiction held for centuries and was broken only by the Portuguese arrival in Ceylon in 1505.
- Site withinGalle Fort
Galle Fort is the Dutch-rebuilt (1663) fortification standing on the headland at the entrance of Galle harbour — the specific colonial-era structure inside the much older port city of Galle, in continuous use as a trading harbour from Anuradhapura-era antiquity. The Portuguese had put up an earlier earthwork in 1588; the Dutch wrapped it in bastioned ramparts after taking the city in 1640; the British kept the whole ensemble after 1796 and modern Galle grew around it. UNESCO World Heritage 1988.
Sources
Standard reference.
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