Taprobane

Taprobana (Ancient Greek: Ταπροβανᾶ) or Taprobane (Ταπροβανῆ) was the name by which the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka was known to the ancient Greeks.

Reports of the island's existence were known before the time of Alexander the Great as inferred from Pliny. The treatise De Mundo (supposedly by Aristotle (died 322 BC) but according to others by Chrysippus the Stoic (280 to 208 BC)) states that the island is as large as Great Britain. The name was first reported to Europeans by the Greek geographer Megasthenes around 290 BC. Herodotus (444 BC) does not mention the island. The first Geography in which it appears is that of Eratosthenes (276 to 196 BC) and was later adopted by Ptolemy (139 AD) in his geographical treatise to identify a relatively large island south of continental Asia.

Taprobana may be the Greek rendition of Tamraparni or Tambapanni, meaning "copper-colored," the descriptive name of one of the rivers of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. According to Western legend, the inhabitants had a single giant foot that they used to protect themselves from the sun.

For some time, the exact place to which the name referred remained uncertain. The likely possibilities included:

The identity of Ptolemy's Taprobane has been a source of confusion, but it appeared to be the present day Sri Lanka on the medieval maps of Abu-Rehan (1030) and Edrisi (1154) and in the writing of Marco Polo (1292). However, on the maps of the Middle Ages, the fashion of using Latinised names and delineating places with fanciful figures contributed to absurd designs and confusion regarding the island and Sumatra. In the fifteenth century, Niccolò de' Conti mistakenly identified Taprobana with a much smaller island. Taprobana/Ceylon/Sri Lanka is marked in the 1507 Martin Waldseemuller map.

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