Throughout its 3,000-plus-year recorded history, the island of Sri Lanka, located off the southeastern tip of India, has been given many names. The first Indian prince to drift ashore called it “the land of copper-red earth” (Tambapanni); ancient Greeks referred to it as Taprobane; the 14th-century Arabs who chanced upon it named it Serendip (the origin of the word serendipity); while in the colonialists’ mouths it morphed from Ceilão (the Portuguese) to Zeilan (the Dutch) to Ceylon (the British...
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