NO. 47—1896.] MALAY, SINHALESE, AND TAMIL. 235 



Jesuit Mathematicians of the King of France who were sent 

 there, is called Malaie or Malaios. But because Malabar is 

 also called by some the Male country, some have thought 

 from that that the name Malay was derived from it. So 

 Cosmas Indicopleustes, who lived in the sixth century, and 

 whose works have been edited by that most learned man to 

 whom literature owes so much, Bernard de Montfaucon, calls 

 it " the place that is called Male, where the pepper grows." 

 The author also, who is known by the name of "the Nubian 

 Geographer,"* seems to call the same region Melt or Mali 

 (Part VII., chap. II.), although he describes it as an island 

 situated in the sea and distant three miles from the city of 

 Sandan (for if he had merely spoken of it as an island this 

 might, according to the usage of the Arabic language, be 

 understood as referring to a peninsula such as is the Malabar 

 country), as those persons are often mistaken in their de- 

 scription of remote places. " The island of Melai is that 

 in which pepper grows, which has its origin nowhere else 

 than here and in Candana and Zjarebtan." And the 

 Malabar country is that which is chiefly celebrated on account 

 of the production of pepper, and it was therefore commonly 

 called by the Arabs " the pepper country." 



* This is the Arabian Geographer Edrisi, or Idrisi, who is thus referred 

 to by Tennent (3rd edition, vol. I., p. 597):— -"Of the Arabian authors 

 of the middle ages the one who dwells most largely on Ceylon is Edrisi, 

 born of a family who ruled over Malaya after the fall of the Khalifs of 

 Cordova. He was a protege of the Sicilian King Roger the Norman, at 

 whose desire he compiled his Geography, a.d. 1154," which Tennent 

 describes as " a Compendium of Geographical knowledge as it existed in 

 his time" (lac. cit., p. 448). Reland calls him "the Nubian Geographer" 

 from the title of his book, or ab least of the Latin edition of it. 



I am indebted to Mr. D. W. Ferguson for the following transcript of the 

 title from the British Museum Library Catalogue : — 



" Geographia Nubiensis, id est accoratissima totius orbis in sept em climata 

 divisi descriptio, continens prcesertivi exactam universce Asia;, et Africa? 



explication-em. [An abridgment of Al Idrisis Nuzhat Al Mushtak.] 



Recens en Arabico in Latinum versa a Gabriell Sionita et Joanne 



Hessonita (De nonnullis Orientalium urbibus, necnon indigenarum religione 



ac moribus tractatus a Gabr. Sionita ac Joanne Hessonita, etc,'). 



2, pt. H. Blagaart : Parisiis, 1619. 



" The traDslation used by Tennent was a French one, by Jaubert." 



