‘Java’ in Ptolemy’s Geographia
By: Medieval Indonesia
Tags: Java, Maps, Ptolemy, Greek, Etymology

Ἰαβαδιοῦ in Rome, BAV, Urb.Gr.82

Indeed, the Geographia’s extremely early date means that it contains probably the oldest surviving reference to a place in the Indian Ocean called ‘Java’ (vel sim) in western Afro-Eurasian literature. (1) The oldest manuscripts antedate the return of Marco Polo from China and so can also be said to contain the oldest (arguably) European cartographic depictions of an island bearing a ‘Java’-ish name. (2) The Geographia is thus frequently invoked in arguments about the etymology of the name ‘Java’. I’m afraid I find these arguments rather dull and I’m not really interested in going over the discussions in any particular detail, and I certainly won’t come to any conclusions on the matter — I’d much rather show you a fascinating old manuscript instead. We’ll come back to the etymological question shortly but it isn’t the main subject of this post.

The manuscript in question is Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urbinas Graecus 82. It was copied in Constantinople in Greek minuscule c.1300 CE, and, as the oldest copy of the Geographia in good condition and with a complete set of maps, it is considered a particularly authoritative witness (see Stückelberger and Mittenhuber 2009:11). Urb.Gr.82 has been in Italy since the fifteenth century at the latest, and it was once owned by early-fifteenth-century Florence’s richest man, Palla Strozzi, who seems to have liked rare and expensive books like this.

As noted above, Urb.Gr.82 appears to contain the oldest depiction of a place called ‘Java’ on a map in a European language (Figures 2 and 3). (3) The map is one of the last in the book, appearing on f.108r. It depicts an island known as Ἰαβαδιοῦ (sometimes presumed to be a genitive form of Ἰαβαδιός, but see below) some way east of the Golden Chersonese (i.e. mainland Southeast Asia or the Malay Peninsula — see Wheatley 1966:138–162):

Fig. 2— The island of Ἰαβαδιοῦ in Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb.Gr.82, f.107v-108r, complete with the beautiful Vatican watermark.

The capital city (μητρόπολιν) of the island of Ἰαβαδιοῦ is said to have been named Ἀργύρη, ‘Silver’ (from ἄργυρος). This town can be seen in the depiction of the island on the Urb.Gr.82 map with its little battlements outlined in red (Figure 3). From the perspective of actually identifying the island the town’s name is rather unhelpful: It can be compared to the (mythical, folkloric) islands of ‘Silver’ (argyre) and ‘Gold’ (chryse) that appear in the description of India in Pomponius Mela’s De Chorographia (43 CE). (4)

Fig. 3— A close-up of Ιαβαδιοῦ in Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb.Gr.82, f.108r. I’m not a specialist in Greek minuscule to say the least, so the entire caption isn’t clear to me, but the name is easy to make out.

The description of this Ἰαβαδιοῦ (⟨ϊαβαδιοῦ⟩ as it is spelled in the text) in the Geographia (f.57va) is fairly short. The island is listed after a couple of other places in the Indian Ocean said to have been home to cannibals (ἀνθρωποφάγων). It is said to be ‘most fertile’ (εύφορωτάτη); gold (χρυσόν) is produced there; and its capital, as mentioned above, is named ‘Silver’. This accords rather well with later stereotypical descriptions of the western islands of the archipelago and of Sumatra in particular, although of course it’s not detailed enough to actually allow us to pinpoint which island it’s supposed to be.

In the view of the aforementioned etymologists, however, the crux of the description is this line (Figure 4):

ϊαβαδιοῦ, ὃ σημαίνει κριθῆς νῆσος

‘Iabadiou, which means “Island of Barley”.’

Fig. 4— The description of ϊαβαδιου in Ptolemy’s Geographia. Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb.Gr.82, f.57va.

It’s probably worth looking at this line for a moment, although I’m a little reluctant to do so. Arguments about the etymology of ‘Java’ have been rather fierce in the past; the exchange between Waruno Mahdi and Arlo Griffiths in Archipel a few years ago was particularly unedifying (see Mahdi 2013).

The essential problem is this: Variants of the name ‘Java’ appear in lots of old texts in lots of languages — Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Old French, Sanskrit, and others — in reference to places that may or may not have been the island we now call Java. Some are definitely references to Sumatra instead, and some may even refer to Borneo, as possibly in Bracciolini’s De Varietate Fortunæ and probably in the Sanskrit Vāyu Purāṇa (as Roland Braddell once argued; see also Kullanda 2006). The question that vexes so many scholars is whether the ‘Java’-ish appellations originally referred to (part of?) one or other of these islands (Figure 5). The problem is compounded by the fact that large islands often don’t even have traditional names in Malayo-Polynesian-speaking societies, so a certain amount of flexibility in the referents of names used in old texts should probably be expected.

Fig. 5— The vexed question.

The standard view is that Ptolemy’s ϊαβαδιοῦ is a transliteration of the Sanskrit name Yavadvīpa, or of Yāvadīvu, a Middle Indo-Aryan/‘Prakrit’ variant. Dvīpa means ‘island’ and yáva does indeed mean ‘barley’ — or, as Monier-Williams’ A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899:847 sub यव) says, ‘in the earliest times prob[ably] any grain or corn yielding flour or meal’.

Barley (Hordeum vulgare) doesn’t grow well in the tropics and it has never made up a significant part of the diet in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago, as far as we know, but other grains were certainly eaten in the region in Ptolemy’s day, including rice (Oryza sativa) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica). In Old Javanese the latter was called jawawut, and sometimes also simply jawa, from proto-Austronesian *zawa, and it is notable that one Old Javanese text — the fifteenth-century prose work Tantu Paṅgĕlaran (Pigeaud 1924) — says that Jawa (=the Javanese-speaking parts of Java) was named for its abundance of jawawut.

Does this identify ϊαβαδιοῦ as Java (in our modern sense)? I suppose you should read the back-and-forth between Mahdi and Griffiths before you come to any conclusions. I’m happy to leave that problem where it is, particularly as Ptolemy was writing over a millennium before most of the other texts I work on were written, and the description in the text is vague enough that it could have been almost anywhere in western island Southeast Asia.