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TABROBANE AND EGYPT

 

            In an otherwise instructive Article “GLEANER” (C.D.N. 15.1.63), under the heading “Leaves from the Past:”, has apparently made a slip in his historical excursion relating to Ceylon and ancient Egypt.

 

1. Taprobane

Taprobane is a term which was, for the first time, used by Megasthenes, a Greek Ambassador at Pataliputra, (fourth century, B.C.), to indicate a kingdom in the extreme south of the Indian sub-continent.  Megasthenes, however, knew very little of the geography of the south of India, and wrote a fabulous account of the south from heresay reports of the Dravidian merchants of the eastern coasts of India who had visited Pataliputra.

 

            By “TAPROBANE”, he was actually referring to Tambraparni in the extreme south of the Indian peninsula, a portion of the Pandyan Tamil kingdom; Ceylon too, owing to its proximity to the southern tip of India, was considered to be an extension of Tambraparni or Taprobane.  It has been pointed out that the Tambapani of the Asokan Edict probably, referred to the extreme south of India, watered by the Tambaraparni river.  (B. C. Law, on “The Chronicles of Ceylon”, p. 60).

 

            Hence the alternative use of the names Tambapani and Lanka to indicate Ceylon, found in the early Pali Chronicles of the Island.

 

            It will be known that Hugh Neville of the Ceylon Civil Service (XIX C.), edited the now almost forgotten, Taprobanian which he rightly called a “Dravidian Journal”.

 

2.      Dravidian Commerce

Early trade of the historic Tamil Kingdoms with Egypt is a well established fact.  Reference to the “Cambridge History of India”, will show that the words for rice, ginger, cinnamon, sandalwood and peacock known to the Egyptians, Hebrew and Greeks were all of Tamil origin.

 

            Dr. Barnott (Cambridge History of India, p. 594) says – “Long before the beginning of the Christian era the Dravidian south had developed a considerable culture of its own, and its inhabitants had consolidated themselves into powerful kingdoms carrying on a thriving trade with western Asia, Egypt – and later

 

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with the Greek and Roman Empire”.  In his “History of South India” (p. 76) Nilakanta Sastri writes – “It has been pointed out rightly that rice, peacock, sandalwood, every unknown article which was imported by sea to Babylon, before the 5th century B.C. brought with it a Dravidian and not a Sanskrit designation”.  Reference also may be made to B. Lal’s discoveries establishing a significant link between the ancient Nubians of upper Egypt and the early Dravidians of South India”.  (vide, report in the “Ceylon Observer”, 26.5.62).

 

3.  Pearls and Cleopatra

            A study of the “commerce between the Roman Empire and India” (E. H. Warmington), will show that the Pearl Fisheries of Tuticorin, the Gulf of Mannar and Tambelgam were, through the ages, till the occupation of Ceylon by the Portuguese, mainly under the control of Pandyan Tamil Kings.  Most of the wars in Ceylon (according to Warmington, ibid. p. 120) were largely due to rivalry between the Pandyan and Chola Tamil Kings for the control of the Ceylon Pearl Fisheries.

 

1.      Buddhism

            The Mahavamsa does not refer to any “Sinhalese King” as such sending an embassy to Egypt.  Buddhism, however, was popular among the Tamils of South India and North Ceylon, during the early centuries of the Christian era, as it is evidenced by the Tamil Buddhist Epic, “The Manimekalai”.

 

S. J. Gunasegaram