Names of Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka (ශ්‍රී ලංකා; சிறி லங்கா / இலங்கை), 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.

The oldest recorded name of Sri Lanka is Tamraparni (= Taprobane). Six centuries before Christ, it was named Simhalam (Simhala in Pali). Simhalam became Saylan mentioned from the 9th century. Lanka appears between the 10th and the 12th centuries after Christ.

Before 6th century BC : Taprobana, Tamraparni
Tamraparni is the oldest recorded name of Sri Lanka. 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 Gabala Erenn) as Deprofane (Recension 2) and Tibra Faine (Recension 3), off the coast of India, supposedly one of the countries where the Milesians / Gaedel, 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.

From 6th century BCe to 9th century CE : Silam, Sihala, Sailan
Six centuries before Christ, Sri Lanka was known as Silam, from the Pali Sihalam (or Simhalam, Sihalan, Sihala ). Silam was transliterated as Sinhale in Sinhala, and Ilam in Tamil (from Silam without the initial sibilant).

In the Dipavaṃsa (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).

The Buddhist monk Faxian (3rd and 4th century CE) called the island Sinhala (or the Lion kingdom ). 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.

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.

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 10th 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 (ශ්‍රී ලංකා නිදහස් පක්ෂය) 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.

Serendip
The names Serendip and Seren-dip are Persian and Arab translation of the Classical Tamil name of Sri Lanka, Séradīb, derived from the Tamil words Chera (meaning Naga or declivity of a mountain) and Theevu (meaning island).

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.

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. 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 entrepôt 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.