demonstrative of its inapplicability to Ceylon, the
existence of which had been known to the Greeks three
hundred years before. It is the story of a merchant
made captive by pirates and carried to AEthiopia, where,
in compliance with a solemn rite, he and a companion
were exposed in a boat, which, after a voyage of four
months, was wafted to one of the Fortunate Islands,
in the Southern Sea, where he resided seven years,
whence having been expelled, he made his way to Palibothra,
on the Ganges, and thence returned to Greece.
In the pretended account of this island given by JAMBULUS
I cannot discover a single attribute sufficient to
identify it with Ceylon. On the contrary, the
traits which he narrates of the country and its inhabitants,
when they are not manifest inventions, are obviously
borrowed from the descriptions of the continent of
India, given by CTESIAS and MEGASTHENES. PRINSEP,
in his learned analysis of the Sanchi Inscription,
shows that what JAMBULUS says of the alphabet of his
island agrees minutely with the character and symbols
on the ancient Buddhist lats of Central India.
Journ.
Asiat. Soc. Ben., vol. vi. p. 476.
WILFORD, in his
Essay on the Sacred Isles of the
West, Asiat. Res. x. 150, enumerates the statements
of JAMBULUS which might possibly apply to Sumatra,
but certainly not to Ceylon, an opinion in which he
had been anticipated by RAMUSIO, vol. i. p. 176.
LASSEN, in his
Indische Alterthumskunde, vol.
iii. p. 270, assigns his reasons for believing that
Bali, to the east of Java, must be the island in which
JAMBULUS laid the scene of his adventures. DIODORUS
SICULUS, lib. ii. ch. lv., &c. An attempt has
also been made to establish an identity between Ceylon
and the island of Panchoea, which Diodoras describes
in the Indian Sea, between Arabia and Gedrosia (lib.
v. 41, &c.); but the efforts of an otherwise ingenious
writer have been unsuccessful. See GROVER’s
Voice from Stonehenge, P. i. p. 95.]
[Footnote 2: PLINY, lib. xxii. ch. liii. iv.
ch. xxiv. vii. ch. ii.]
[Footnote 3: “Legatos quatuor misit principe
eoram Rachia.”—PLINY, lib. vi. c.
24. This passage is generally understood to indicate
four ambassadors, of whom the principal was one named
Rachias. CASIE CHITTY, in a learned paper on
the early History of Jaffna, offers another
conjecture that “Rachia” may mean Arachia,
a Singhalese designation of rank which exists to the
present day; and in support of his hypothesis he instances
the coincidence that “at a later period a similar
functionary was despatched by the King Bhuwaneka-Bahu
VIII. as ambassador to the court of Lisbon.”—Journal
Ceylon Asiat. Soc., p. 74, 1848. The
event to which he refers is recorded in the Rajavali:
it is stated that the king of Cotta, about the year
1540, “caused a figure of the prince his grandson
to be made of gold, and sent the same under the care
of Sallappoo Arachy, to be delivered to the