Gerini Has Fixed On Maniola For Car-Nicobar And
Agathodaimonos For Great Nicobar As The Right Ascription Of Ptolemy's
Island Names For This Region.
This ascription agrees generally with the
mediaeval editions of Ptolemy.
Yule's guess that Ptolemy's Barussae is the
Nicobars is corrected by Gerini's statement that it refers to Nias. In the
1490 edition of Ptolemy, the Satyrorum Insulae placed to the south-east of
the Malay Peninsula, where the Anamba islands east of Singapore, also on
the line of the old route to China, really are, have opposite them the
remark: - qui has inhabitant caudas habere dicuntur - no doubt in
confusion with the Nicobars. They are without doubt the Lankhabalus of the
Arab Relations (851 A.D.), which term may be safely taken as a
misapprehension or mistranscription of some form of Nicobar (through
Nakkavar, Nankhabar), thus affording the earliest reference to the modern
term. But there is an earlier mention of them by I-Tsing, the Chinese
Buddhist monk, in his travels, 672 A.D., under the name of the Land of the
Naked People (Lo-jen-kuo), and this seems to have been the recognised name
for them in China at that time. 'Land of the Naked' translates Nakkavaram,
the name by which the islands appear in the great Tanjore inscription of
1050. This name reappears in Marco Polo's Necuveran 1292, in Rashiduddin's
Nakwaram 1300, and in Friar Odoric's Nicoveran 1322, which are the lineal
ancestors of the 15th and 16th Century Portuguese Nacabar and Nicubar and
the modern Nicobar.
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