CEYLON BRANCH— ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY. 101 



there must originally have been a great resemblance be- 

 tween the two languages, as the mere fact that nine-tenths 

 of the words composing the Singhalese can be traced to 

 one common origin is itself a proof that as a dialect it is 

 singularly uniform in the character of its etymology. The 

 second of these hypotheses seems to me to be the most pro- 

 bable, as I am far from thinking that the ancient race of the 

 Island was so rude and ignorant as it is generally regarded. 



Soon after the arrival of Wijaya he visited the city of 

 Lankapura, which is not a mere city of the imagination, as 

 its site can still be pointed out, in the district of Matala. 

 The existence of a city, in whatever place, is a proof that 

 there must at some period have been connected with it a 

 government, sufficiently wise to promulgate laws, and suffi- 

 ciently powerful to enforce them. The inhabitants of the 

 interior still refer the erections with which many of their 

 localities abound to the yakas, or demon race. 



Another proof that the Island was peopled by a civilized 

 race before the era of Gotama Budha is to be found in the 

 fact that many of the places mentioned in Ramayana as be- 

 ing visited by Rama during his invasion of Ceylon, may 

 still be traced. They must therefore have been in existence 

 at the time this epic was written, one of the oldest in the 

 world ; and there must at the same period have been at least 

 occasional intercourse between this Island and India. 



On the arrival of Mihindu, b. c. 306. he orally promul- 

 gated the atuwawas, or commentaries, on the three great 

 sections of the sacred books of the Budhists ; and it is ex- 

 pressly stated that this was done in the Singhalese language, 

 and that they were subsequently translated from Singhalese 

 into Pali, by Budha-ghosa, who visited this Island in the 

 reign of Maha Kama, A. D. 410 — 422. The period that 

 elapsed between the arrival of Wijaya and that of Mihindu, 

 237 years, was too short, in the then state of the country, 

 to have allowed of the formation of a language, from crude 

 materials of dissimilar origin, sufficiently copious in its 

 terms and regular in its structure to have been capable of 

 the enunciation in it of discourses so varied and abstract as 

 the atuwawas. 



From these premises we may infer, if any faith whatever 

 is to be placed in the ancient chronicles of the Island, that 

 the Singhalese must be one of the oldest of the living lan- 

 guages. But of its state in these early periods no examples 

 are now extant, as even the original atuwawas have all pe- 

 rished, though the translations made by Budha-ghosa still 

 remain. It is probable that the oldest examples now in ex- 



