A land more captivating than words can express enjoyed the honor of numerous name changes over the centuries. Each name trying to better describe the beauty of the land than the other. Sri lanka’s many name changes over the centuries are a reflection of its fascinating history and beauty.

This is a photograph I has taken on our family tours to Portugal earlier this year (2011). This map is housed at the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, in Belem Lisbon, and shows an ancient day map which had been created by the Portugese Sea farers. It depicts the trade routes that were used back in the day and shows Sri Lanka as Ceilao, which is what the Portuguese called Sri Lanka around the 15^th & 16^th century.

The island that we all currently know as Sri Lanka has had a string of other identities and has been known under the range of nicknames and pseudonyms. To Prince Vijaya and the founding fathers it was, in their Sanskrit language, Tambapanni. Tambapanni meaning copper-colored beach was what they described the beach they had landed on their arrival to Lanka. Historians deem this to be either Mannar or Puttalam, which is not exactly certain. What they are certain of is that it was on the ester coast of the island that they did land on.

In the reign of the Roman Emperor Claudius, a sea captain working for Annius Plocamus, a tax collector in the Red Sea, suffered the misfortune of catching a monsoon that swept his boat off course and pushed him on the island 15 days later. For him, and other Roman and Greek callers, Tambapanni was too much of a mouthful and became Taprobane. The geographer Ptolemy rang a slight change by showing it as Taprobanam on his famous 2^nd century AD map.

Arab traders could have told Annius Plocamus’s captain that if he waited a while a different monsoon would blow him back to Arabia or, if he liked, East Africa. They relied on these winds to go back and forth, knew the island well and called it Serendib. This name is a corruption of the Sanskit Sinhaladvipa. Cosmas Indicopleustes, theByzantine author of Christian Topography, twisted the Arabic into Sielediba, but the 18^th-Century English novelist Horance Walpole stuck to the original for his fairy tale, The Three Prices of Serendib, and used it to coin “serendipity”, meaning happy discovery by accident.

Edward Batbosa, a Portugese captain who visited in 1515, tried to persuade his countrymen to adopt Tennaserim, which in some ancient Indian language meant “Land of Delights”, but they had already settled on Ceilao, which had started as the Chinese Si-lan and, thanks to medieval Europeans like Marco Polo, became Seylan. The Dutch worked out their own derivation to produce Zeilan; the English compromise was Ceylon.

Through all of this, the Sinhalese had long ago decided it was Lanka, and it officially changed to Sri Lanka in 1972 (the prefix means “holy” or “beautiful”). In 1978 the island was officially deemed Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, and to date is still proudly a democratic sovereign state.