c. A.D. 60.—"Μαλάβαθρον ἔνιοι ὑπολάμβάνουσιν εἶναι τῆς Ἰνδικῆς νάρδου φύλλον, πλανώμενοι ὑπὸ τῆς κατὰ τὴν ὀσμὴν, ἐμφερειας, ... ἴδιον γαρ ἐστι γένος φυόμενον ἐν τοῖς Ἰνδικοῖς τέλμασι, φύλλον ὃν ἐπινηχόμενον ὕδατι."—Dioscorides, Mat. Med. i. 11.
c. A.D. 70.—"We are beholden to Syria for Malabathrum. This is a tree that beareth leaves rolled up round together, and seeming to the eie withered. Out of which there is drawn and pressed an Oile for perfumers to use.... And yet there commeth a better kind thereof from India.... The rellish thereof ought to resemble Nardus at the tongue end. The perfume or smell that ... the leafe yeeldeth when it is boiled in wine, passeth all others. It is straunge and monstrous which is observed in the price; for it hath risen from one denier to three hundred a pound."—Pliny, xii. 26, in Ph. Holland.
c. A.D. 90.—"... Getting rid of the fibrous parts, they take the leaves and double them up into little balls, which they stitch through with the fibres of the withes. And these they divide into three classes.... And thus originate the three qualities of Malabathrum, which the people who have prepared them carry to India for sale."—Periplus, near the end. [Also see Yule, Intro. Gill, River of Golden Sand, ed. 1883, p. 89.]
1563.—"R. I remember well that in speaking of betel you told me that it was not folium indu, a piece of information of great value to me; for the physicians who put themselves forward as having learned much from these parts, assert that they are the same; and what is more, the modern writers ... call betel in their works tembul, and say that the Moors give it this name....
"O. That the two things are different as I told you is clear, for Avicenna treats them in two different chapters, viz., in 259, which treats of folium indu, and in 707, which treats of tambul ... and the folium indu is called by the Indians Tamalapatra, which the Greeks and Latins corrupted into Malabathrum," &c.—Garcia, ff. 95v, 96.
c. 1690.—"Hoc Tembul seu Sirium, licet vulgatissimum in India sit folium, distinguendum est a Folio Indo seu Malabathro, Arabibus Cadegi Hindi, in Pharmacopoeis, et Indis, Tamala-patra et folio Indo dicto,... A nostra autem natione intellexi Malabathrum nihil aliud esse quam folium canellae, seu cinnamomi sylvestris."—Rumphius, v. 337.
c. 1760.—"... quand l'on considère que les Indiens appellent notre feuille Indienne tamalapatra on croit d'apercevoir que le mot Grec μαλάβατρον en a été anciennement dérivé."—(Diderot) Encyclopédie, xx. 846.
1837.—(Malatroon is given in Arabic works of Materia Medica as the Greek of Sādhaj, and tuj and tej-pat as the Hindi synonymes). "By the latter names may be obtained everywhere in the bazars of India, the leaves of Cinn. Tamala and of Cinn. albiflorum."—Royle, Essay on Antiq. of Hindoo Medicine, 85.
MALACCA, n.p. The city which gives its name to the Peninsula and the Straits of Malacca, and which was the seat of a considerable Malay monarchy till its capture by the Portuguese under D'Alboquerque in 1511. One naturally supposes some etymological connection between Malay and Malacca. And such a connection is put forward by De Barros and D'Alboquerque (see below, and also under [MALAY]). The latter also mentions an alternative suggestion for the origin of the name of the city, which evidently refers to the Ar. mulāḳāt, 'a meeting.' This last, though it appears also in the Sijara Malayu, may be totally rejected. Crawfurd is positive that the place was called from the word malaka, the Malay name of the Phyllanthus emblica, or emblic [Myrobalan] (q.v.), "a tree said to be abundant in that locality"; and this, it will be seen below, is given by Godinho de Eredia as the etymology. Malaka again seems to be a corruption of the Skt. amlaka, from amla, 'acid.' [Mr. Skeat writes: "There can be no doubt that Crawfurd is right, and that the place was named from the tree. The suggested connection between Malayu and Malaka appears impossible to me, and, I think, would do so to any one acquainted with the laws of the language. I have seen the Malaka tree myself and eaten its fruit. Ridley in his Botanical Lists has laka-laka and malaka which he identifies as Phyllanthus emblica, L. and P. pectinatus Hooker (Euphorbiaceae). The two species are hardly distinct, but the latter is the commoner form. The fact is that the place, as is so often the case among the Malays, must have taken its name from the Sungei Malaka, or Malaka River.">[
1416.—"There was no King but only a chief, the country belonging to Siam.... In the year 1409, the imperial envoy Cheng Ho brought an order from the emperor and gave to the chief two silver seals, ... he erected a stone and raised the place to a city, after which the land was called the Kingdom of Malacca (Moa-la-ka).... Tin is found in the mountains ... it is cast into small blocks weighing 1 catti 8 taels ... ten pieces are bound together with rattan and form a small bundle, whilst 40 pieces make a large bundle. In all their trading ... they use these pieces of tin instead of money."—Chinese Annals, in Groenveldt, p. 123.