The Ancient Geography of India. I. The Buddhist Period, including the Campaigns of Alexander, and the Travels of Hwen-Thsang c9.10

c9.10

In his interesting and valuable work on Ceylon, Sir Emerson Tennent has suggested that the port of Galle may be the *Tarshish** of the Bible, “which lay in the track between the Arabian Gulf and *Ophir*,” and that *Ophir* itself is Malacca, or the Aurea Chersonesus, because “*Ophir*, in the language of the Malays, is the generic name for any gold mine.” But this view seems to me to be quite untenable, as the names of all the articles brought back by Solomon’s fleet are pure Sanskrit. Sir Emerson states that they are “identical with the Tâmil names by which some of them are called in Ceylon to the present day.” These names are *sen-habim*, or “teeth of elephants,” *kophim*, or “apes,” and *tuküm*, or “parrots.” But these are the pure Sanskrit words *ibha*, *kapi*, and *ṣuka*, with the mere addition of the Hebrew plural termination. It is true that these Sanskrit names have been naturalized in the south of India, but they have not displaced the original Tâmil appellations, which still remain the terms in common use, namely, *yâné* for elephant, *kuranga* for monkey, and *mayil* for peacock, or *kilip-pillai* for parrot. Now, if the fleet of Solomon obtained these Sanskrit names in Ceylon, then we must admit that the Aryan race had pushed their conquests to the extreme south of India some centuries before the time of Solomon, that is about 1200 or 1500 B.C. But at this very time, as we learn from their own records, the Aryas had not yet crossed the Narbada, nor even penetrated to the mouth of the Ganges. It does not therefore seem possible that any of their names could have been obtained either in Ceylon or in the south of India so early as the time of Solomon. Even according to their own annals,* the Ceylonese were barbarians until the landing of Vijaya, in B.C. 543; and there is no satisfactory evidence of any Aryan connection or intercourse before the time of Mahendra, the son of Asoka, in B.C. 242.