CHAP. II.] INDIAN, ARABIAN, PERSIAN AUTHORITIES, 



King of Serendib recommends wine and prohibits de- 

 bauchery." The exports of the island he describes as 

 silk, precious stones of every hue, rock-crystal, diamonds, 

 and a profusion of perfumes. 1 



The last of this class of writers to whom it is neces- 

 sary to allude is KAZWINI, who lived at Bagdad in the 

 thirteenth century, and, from the diversified nature of his 

 writings, has been called the Pliny of the East. In his 

 geographical account of India, he includes Ceylon, but it 

 is evident from the details into which he enters as to the 

 customs of the court and the people, such as the burning 

 of the widows of the kings on the same pile with their 

 husbands, that the information he had received had been 

 collected amongst the Brahmanical, not the Budd- 

 hist portion of the people. This is confirmatory of 

 the actual condition of the people of Ceylon at the 

 period as shown by the native chronicles, the king being 

 the Malabar Magha, who invaded the island from 

 Kalinga, 1219, overthrew the Buddhist religion, dese- 

 crated its monuments and temples, and destroyed the 

 edifices and literary records of the capital. 2 



KAZWINI dwells on the productions of the island, its 

 spices, and its odours, its precious woods and medical 

 drugs, its profusion of gems, its gold and silver work,, 

 and its pearls 3 : but one circumstance will not fail to 

 strike the reader as a strange omission in these frequent 

 enumerations of the exports of Ceylon. I have traced 

 them from their earliest notices by the Greeks and 

 Romans to the period when the commerce of the East 

 had reached its climax in the hands of the Persians and 

 Arabians. My survey extends over fifteen centuries, 

 during which Ceylon and its productions were familiarly 

 known to the traders of all countries, and yet in the 

 pages of no author, European or Asiatic, from the earliest 



1 EDRISI, G6ogr. Transl. de Jau- 

 bert, 4to. Paris, 1836, t. i. p. 71, &c. 

 Edrisi, in Ms " Notice of Ceylon/' 

 quotes largely and verbatim from 

 the work of Abou-zeyd. 



2 Mahawanso, ch. Ixxx. Rajaratna- 

 cari, p. 93 ; Rajavati, p. 256. TUE- 

 NOTJK^S Epitome, 8,-c., p. 44. 



3 KAZWINI, in Gildemeister. Script. 

 Arab. p. 198. 



