[Footnote 2:  IBN BATUTA, Lee’s translation, p. 172.]

[Footnote 3:  Mahawanso, ch. vii. p. 51; ch. xxv. p. 155; ch. xxxv. p. 217.]

Abou-zeyd describes the rendezvous of the ships arriving from Oman, where they met those bound for the Persian Gulf, as lying half-way between Arabia and China.  “It was the centre,” he says, “of the trade in aloes and camphor, in sandal-wood, ivory and lead."[1] This emporium he denominates “Kalah,” and when we remember that lie is speaking of a voyage which he had not himself made, and of countries then very imperfectly known to the people of the West, we shall not be surprised that he calls it an island, or rather a peninsula.

[Footnote 1:  ABOU-ZEYD, Relation, &c., vol. i. p. 93; REINAUD, Disc. p. lxxiv.]

According to him, it was at that period subject to the Maharaja of Zabedj, the sovereign of a singular kingdom of which little is known, but which appears to have been formed about the commencement of the Christian era; and which, in the eighth and ninth centuries, extended over the groups of islands south and west of Malacca, including Borneo, Java, and Sumatra, which had become the resort of a vast population of Indians, Chinese, and Malays.[1] The sovereign of this opulent empire had brought under his dominion the territory of the King of Comar, the southern extremity of the Dekkan[2], and at the period when Abou-zeyd wrote, he likewise claimed the sovereignty of “Kalah.”

[Footnote 1:  Journ.  Asiat. vol. xlix. p. 206; ELPHINSTONE’s India, b. iii. ch. x. p. 168; REINAUD, Memoires sur l’Inde, p. 39; Introd. ABOULFEDA, p. cccxc.  Baron Walckenaer has ascertained, from the puranas and other Hindu sources, that the Great Dynasty of the Maharaja continued till A.D. 628, after which the islands were sub-divided into numerous sovereignties.  See MAJOR’s Introduction to the Indian Voyages in the Fifteenth Century, in the Hakluyt Soc.  Publ. p. xxvii.]

[Footnote 2:  MASSOUDI relates the conquest of the kingdom of Comar by the Maharaja of Zabedj, nearly in the same words as it is told by Abou-zeyd; GILDEMEISTER, Script.  Arab., pp. 145, 146.  REINAUD. Memoires sur l’Inde, p. 225.]

This incident is not mentioned in the Singhalese chronicles, but their silence is not to be regarded as conclusive evidence against its probability; the historians of the Hindus ignore the expedition of Alexander the Great, and it is possible that those of Ceylon, indifferent to all that did not directly concern the religion of Buddha, may have felt little interest in the fortunes of Galle, situated as it was at the remote extremity of the island, and in a region that hardly acknowledged a nominal allegiance to the Singhalese crown.

The assertion of Abou-zeyd as to the sovereignty of the Maharaja of Zabedj, at Kalah, is consistent with the statement of Soleyman in the first portion of the work, that “the island was in subjection to two monarchs;"[1] and this again agrees with the report of Sopater to Cosmas Indico-pleustes, who adds that the king who possessed the hyacinth was at enmity with the king of the country in which were the harbour and the great emporium.[2]