Truth about Sihela ambassadors to court of Roman Emperor Claudius

By Rohana R. Wasala 
rrwasala@gmail.com

At the conclusion of a thoughtful feature article, under the title, ‘A new identity for Sri Lanka’, in The Sunday Island of 25 June, 2023, Uditha Devapriya, a young journalist I admire for the quality of his writing, refers to what he calls a minority view that he shares about Sri Lanka’s contemporary culture. It is that contemporary Sri Lankan culture is ‘derivative and predicable’. To be frank, his concept of culture is not clear to me; nor what he exactly means by the phrase ‘derivative and predicable’. But in the same breath he explains that this quality of present-day Sri Lankan culture is ‘less of a weakness, less of a limitation, than it may appear’ because ‘cultures and histories progress through evolution, and evolution, it must be conceded, involves appropriation, sometimes imitation.’ Devapriya adds:

‘Thus, instead of looking condescendingly down on our “modern” culture or being laid back and complacent about our “glorious past”, we should avoid both extremes and strive to use our identity the way our ancestors did. The four ambassadors sent to the court of Emperor Claudius centuries ago were all representative of this identity: it has been surmised that they were non-Sinhalese, that they were all Tamils. The Romans did not bother about this. As H. A. J. Hulugalle has noted, all they were concerned with was that these ambassadors came from Ceylon, and that they were Sri Lankans first and Sri Lankans last. Perhaps that should be our strategy, our way forward, our redemption.’

I generally agree with the idea that we should ‘use our identity the way our ancestors did’. In fact, this is broadly similar to what I wrote at the end of a long article (not published in The Island) about racism and nationalism in August 2021. So, let me quote the concluding paragraph of my article in full:

‘It is internal divisions that encourage external attacks on our independence. The greatest potential for national unity, in my view, comes from the easy religio-cultural symbiosis between the Tamil Hindus and the Sinhala Buddhists. Since the last-mentioned circumstance above – geographic location – cannot be changed by any means, it must be accepted as an unalterable physical reality in a nationally proactive spirit, not as a curse, but as a blessing.

It is up to the youth of the country of diverse ethnic backgrounds untainted by historical baggage to take up this challenge and forge ahead as one sovereign nation without allowing foreign powers to walk over us, as they have done over the last 73 years. I wrote this long essay, not to stoke fires of racial hatred, but to douse them by ascertaining the truth about our past as far as possible, which will enable us to see our way forward more clearly.’ (Please read 75 years for 73 years, as this was written two years ago.)

Now to deal with the crass lie that Devapriya reproduces from some distortionist source about the historic delegation of four Sinhalese ambassadors sent to the court of the Roman emperor Claudius by king Bhatikabhaya Tissa of Sihela/Sinhale (the European name ‘Ceylon’ is a corruption of the original name Sihela) in the first century BCE. The ambassadors from Sihela were all Sinhalese (not Tamils), led by a member of the reigning Sinhalese royal family, whose father himself had been a diplomat sent to China on a similar mission.

This information is well documented history backed by foreign records. King Bhatikabhaya’s reign was a time of peace and plenty according to the ancient chronicles. But the Mahavamsa (Chapter 36) says little about this king. The name given there is Bhatika Tissa. His reign was 24 years. The services he did to the Buddha Sasana and his developmental projects, described in other chronicles, are just glanced at by the Mahavamsa author. (Current entries about Ceylon history in Wikipedia are mostly anti-Sinhalese and anti-Buddhist distortions. It is up to our patriotic young scholars and historians to set these records right.)

I wrote about the Sinhalese ambassadors in the Roman court and why they went there in the same article written two years ago. I am quoting below the relevant section of my previous article (which was not published in The Island, probably because of non-publishing days due to communication disruptions caused by the Covid pandemic).

Sinhalese ambassadors in the court of emperor Claudius

The Roman historian Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) in his Natural History gives a vivid account of a royal embassy, consisting of four members, with a person called Raki, as its leader from the court of king Bhatika Abhaya Tissa (38-66 CE), visiting the imperial Roman court during the reign of the emperor Claudius (41-54 CE) to negotiate the purchase of red coral from there.  The coral was for making an ornamental net to cover the Maha Tupa (Ruvanveli Maha Saeya) at Anuradhapura as an offering to the sacred monument.  The fact that Ptolemy (c. 100 – c. 170) made his map of Taprobana (Taprobane as foreign visitors at that time called Sinhale) significantly larger than it actually was relative to his map of what is today called India to the north, signifies the importance he attached to the island as a country.

The account of Annius Plocamus, a Roman tax collector from the Mediterranean region, (who mediated the royal ambassadorial visit during king Bhatika Abhaya Tissa’s reign (20 BCE – 9 CE)), currently available in the Wikipedia, provides a fine example of the deliberate distortion of Sinhalese history that has been carried on for nearly a century by certain Tamil racist historians. The Wikipedia entry refers to a certain Tamil writer by the name of T. Isaac Tambyah, author of ‘Psalms of Saiva Saints’ (1925). Isaac Tambyah assumes that the name given by Pliny of the leader of the embassy Rachias is a version of Rasaiah!

He must have pronounced the name as Rashias instead of Rakias. Rasaiah is familiar to us as a common Tamil name. (Actually, to be fair by Isaac Tambyah, he only repeats an obviously uninformed guess that had been made by British governor Emerson Tennent (1804-1869) that the mispronounced Rachias suggested that the embassy was sent to Rome by an alleged Rajah of Jaffna’ It is absolutely certain that there were no permanent Tamil residents in Sihela until the 10th century CE. (The governor had been misled by a Tamil zealot’s figment of imagination for there were no Tamil rulers in Jaffna.

Nor Jaffna either! The area was known as Dambakolapatuna in Sinhala (Jambukolapattana in Pali) in those pre-Christian ties. Dambakolapatuna (or Jambokola pattana in Mudliyar L.C. Wijesinghe’s 1889 translation of The Mahavansa Chapter XVIII) was where Sangamitta Theri disembarked with the Sri Maha Bodhi sapling in the third century BCE. There is no doubt that a Tamil distortionist had fed Tennent with wrong information! The same Wikipedia account suggests that the embassy was prompted by a trivial discovery of the sincerity of Romans by the king. The late Dr D.P.M. Weerakkody, Western Classics scholar, wrote a paper about historical Sri Lanka-Rome relationships in 2013. It was obvious to me that Dr Weerakkody never took the Tamil historian’s claim that Pliny’s Rachias was ‘Rasaiah’ seriously.

Historical truth of the Sinhalese embassy to Rome

The historical truth about the first century Sinhalese embassy to Rome is well established. Authoritative historians have found that the name Rachias is a corrupt form of the Sinhala name Raki or Rakiya, one of the typically short Sinhala names that recurs in a number of inscriptions as distinguished professor in Archaeology Raj Somadeva of the University of Kelaniya, who is an alumnus of Uppsala University, Sweden, has clearly pointed out.  He has provided much documentary and epigraphical evidence to prove this. Pliny himself has given a detailed account of Rachias or Raki, which shows that Raki was an important personage, indeed, a scion of the Sinhalese royal family.

Raki’s father was an ambassador, too. He was employed by the king of Sinhale of the time to lead an embassy to China. For Raki to represent the Sinhalese king in the Roman court, he had to be of the Sinhala royal family. He won’t have insulted the emperor by sending ambassadors under the leadership of a non-Sinhala, non-native commoner called Rasaiah! Can you imagine that a king who was rich enough to buy red corals to make a huge net or jacket to adorn the stupendous Ruvanveli Maha Saeya would do such a thing? (The purpose of the embassy was to negotiate the purchase of those red corals.)