国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

CHAP, XII. p. 307.   SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE.

145

headings called Descriptive, Ethnography, Languages. Under the

heading Descriptive are sub-heads, Geography, Meteorology,

Geography, History, so that practically my Census Report had to

include in a summarised form all the available information there was

about the islands at that time. It has a complete index, and I therefore

suggest that it should be referred to for any point on which information

is required.

NICOBARS.

P. 307. No king or chief. This is incorrect. They have distinct

village communities, governed each by its own chief, with definite rules

of property and succession and marriage. See Census Report, pp. 214,

2I2.

Pp. 307-308, Note 1. For Pulo Gomez, see BOWREY, Countries

Round the Bay of Bengal, ed. Temple, Hakluyt Society, p. 287 and

footnote 4. Bowrey (c. 1675) calls it Pullo Gomus, and a marine

journal of 1675 calls it Polo Gomos.

Origin of the name Nicobars. —On this point I quote my paragraph

thereon on p. 185, Census Report.

" The situation of the Nicobars along the line of a very ancient

trade has caused them to be reported by traders and sea-farers through

all historical times. Gerini has fixed on Maniola for Car-Nicobar and

Agathodaimonos for Great Nicobar as the right ascription of Ptolemy's

island names for this region. This ascription agrees generally with the

medieval editions of Ptolemy. Yule's guess that Ptolemy's Barusse is

the Nicobars is corrected by Gerini's statement that it refers to Nias.

In the 1490 edition of Ptolemy, the Satyrorum Insule placed to the

south-east of the Malay Peninsula, where the Anamba islands east of

Singapore, also on the line of the old route to China, really are, have

opposite them the remark :—qui has inhabitant caudas habere dicuntur-

no doubt in confusion with the Nicobars. They are without doubt the

Lankhabalus of the Arab Relations (851 A.D.), which term may be

safely taken as a misapprehension or mistranscription of some form of

Nicobar (through Nakkavar, Nankhabar), thus affording the earliest

reference to the modern term. But there is an earlier mention of them

by I-Tsing, the Chinese Buddhist monk, in his travels, 672 A.D., under

the name of the Land of the Naked People (Lo-jen-kuo), and this seems

to have been the recognised name for them in China at that time.

` Land of the Naked ' translates Nakkavaram, the name by which the

islands appear in the great Tanjore inscription of 1050. This name

reappears in Marco Polo's Necuveran 1292, in Rashiduddin's Nakwaram

1300, and in Friar Odoric's Nicoveran 1322, which are the lineal

ancestors of the 15th and 16th Century Portuguese Nacabar and

Nicubar and the modern Nicobar. The name has been Nicobar since