1: EDRISI, Géogr. Transl. de Jaubert, 4to. Paris, 1836, t. i. p. 71, &c. Edrisi, in his "Notice of Ceylon," quotes largely and verbatim from the work of Abou-zeyd.

The last of this class of writers to whom it is necessary 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 of the customs of the court and the people, 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 Buddhist 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 Caligna 1219 A.D., overthrew the Buddhist religion, desecrated its monuments and temples, and destroyed the edifices and literary records of the capital.[1]

1: Mahawanso, ch. lxxx. Rajaratnacari, p. 93; Rajavali, p. 256. TURNOUR'S Epitome, &c., p. 44.

KAZWINI, as usual, 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[1]: 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; the 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 ages to the close of the thirteenth century, is there the remotest allusion to Cinnamon as an indigenous production, or even as an article of commerce in Ceylon. I may add, that I have been equally unsuccessful in finding any allusion to it in any Chinese work of ancient date.[2]

1: KAZWINI, in Gildemeister, Script. Arab. p. 108.

2: In the Chinese Materia Medica, "Pun-tsao-kang-muh," cinnamon or cassia is described under the name of "kwei" but always as a production of Southern China and of Cochin China. In the Ming History, a production of Ceylon is mentioned under the name of "Shoo-heang," or "tree-perfume;" but my informant, Mr. Wylie, of Shanghae, is unable to identify it with cinnamon oil.

This unexpected result has served to cast a suspicion on the title of Ceylon to be designated par excellence the "Cinnamon Isle," and even with the knowledge that the cinnamon laurel is indigenous there, it admits of but little doubt that the spice which in the earlier ages was imported into Europe through Arabia, was obtained, first from Africa, and afterwards from India; and that it was not till after the twelfth or thirteenth century that its existence in Ceylon became known to the merchants resorting to the island. So little was its real history known in Europe, even at the latter period, that Phile, who composed his metrical treatise, [Greek: Peri Zôôn Idiotêtos], for the information of the Emperor Michael XI. (Palæologus), about the year 1310, repeats the ancient fable of Herodotus, that cinnamon grew in an unknown Indian country, whence it was carried by birds, from whose nests it was abstracted by the natives of Arabia.[1]

1:

[Greek:

Ornis ho kinnamômos ônomasmenos