So it struck me that, since Taprobane is accepted to have been a mediaeval name for Sri Lanka, that Caligardamana - north of Sri Lanka, and at the mouth of the Ganges - must be Kolkata
Your theory sounds really far-fetched to me. I bet you could dig up tons of names in obscure ancient books that sound just as much like Kolkata as "Caligardamana". Do you have any evidence that it was a port or a notable village before the British period?
But when I looked up Calcutta/Kolkata on Wikipedia, lo and behold! the only references to the name were really quite modern, and the specific article on the etymology of the name seems to be way off, in that most of it just doesn't allow for the place having had that name for about 1000 years before the British arrived
What's "way off" about it? The article mentions several possible etyomologies that have nothing to do with the British.
Your first point seems to me quite absurd. That Kolkata, like Mumbai, owes its existence to British settlement, is indubitable, and apart from the Bengali tendency to close vowels into O's, there is nothing that suggests that Kaligadarmana (in which one might read the word Dharma) could reasonably contract into Kolkata. What is more, seaborne trade between the Roman Empire and southern India was regular and intense throughout the Roman period - we even have the writings of a pilot on the Indian route, a fellow named Cosmas Indikopleustes; but the Romans rarely sailed beyond Sri Lanka and into the Bay of Bengal, and Cosmas himself knows of nothing whatsoever beyond the Straits. My reading of Oriosius would be that Kaligadarmana is not at all on the mouth of the Ganges - there is a sentence in between - but rather "south" of the Ganges and "north" of Sri Lanka. You have to agree that covers a considerable amount of coast, and my inclination would be, given the known facts of Roman trade with India, to place it much closer to Sri
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Paste that at the top of the article and see which notification box shows up. hehehe...
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Your theory sounds really far-fetched to me. I bet you could dig up tons of names in obscure ancient books that sound just as much like Kolkata as "Caligardamana". Do you have any evidence that it was a port or a notable village before the British period?
But when I looked up Calcutta/Kolkata on Wikipedia, lo and behold! the only references to the name were really quite modern, and the specific article on the etymology of the name seems to be way off, in that most of it just doesn't allow for the place having had that name for about 1000 years before the British arrived
What's "way off" about it? The article mentions several possible etyomologies that have nothing to do with the British.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozhikode
Sri Lanka would be south-east of there, fitting in more with the geographic reference in the text.
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