Kerala’s coastline is part of India’s Malabar Coast, stretching from Karwar in Maharashtra to Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu.
Before the British conquered the northern parts of Kerala in 1795, the name Malabar denoted the entirety of Kerala. After the British conquest, only the northern part of Kerala that was under British dominion came to be called Malabar. But Malabar itself has been called various names in history. The British civil servant and colonial administrator, C.A. Innes, published a Madras District Gazetteer report covering Malabar in 1908, reprinted in 1951, and has this to say about the name: “The etymology of the name Malabar has given rise to much controversy. Al Biruni (970–1039 A.D.) appears to have been the first to call the country Malabar; but long before his time the Egyptian merchant, Cosmas Indicopleustes [6th century CE], mentions a town Male on the west coast of India, as a great emporium of the pepper trade. Malabar has therefore been derived from Male, but more probably it is a compound of the Dravidian mala, a hill, and either the Arabic barr a continent, or the Persian bar a country. Malibar, Manibar and the Melibar of Marco Polo are perhaps the most common among the many variants of the name found in the ancient Muhammadan and European writers.”¹
This interchange between [n] and [l] in manibar-malabar by Arabs is interesting, because in ancient Egyptian, [n] was interchangeable with [l] in certain words, and the hieroglyph for the sound [l] was sometimes written using the hieroglyph for [n].² This is not surprising, as ancient Egyptian had similarities with Arabic and vice versa. More interesting for Kerala history is a chance reference carved on the walls of the Egyptian Dendera Temple to a foreign land in the east of Egypt called mnwr.³
Whether [w] in Egyptian could have morphed to [b] in Arabic is perhaps a matter for the linguists, but it is indeed fascinating to see the similarity between Egyptian mnwr and Arabic manibar/malibar. The Dendera Temple was rebuilt in its current form during Ptolemaic times, around 54 BCE, a period when Malabar had prolific Egyptian and Arabic maritime trade.⁴ As Malabar is a foreign country that lies to the east of Egypt, it would not be surprising, if in fact, the land written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs as mnwr was indeed the land we now call Malabar.
Notes
[1] C.A. Innes, 1908, Madras District Gazetteer-Malabar, repr. 1951 (Madras: Government Press), 2. Al-Idrisi, an Arab cartographer and geographer who lived in the 12th century CE and worked for King Roger II at Palermo, Sicily, referred to it as Manibar. Hassan J., Manu T., Sukesh Kumaradas and A.K. Ampotti, 2020, “Arab Accounts of Malabar History: The Early Episodes,” Heritage: Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies in Archaeology, vol. 8.1: 791–810.
[2] James Allen, 2013, The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 39.
[3] 𓏠𓈖𓏴𓂋𓏏𓏏𓈉. https://thesaurus-linguae-aegyptiae.de/lemma/70600.
[4] Jee Francis Therattil, 2011, “Kerala-The Egyptian Connection.” In Proceedings of Archaeology in Kerala: Emerging Trends-Joint Annual Conferences of The Indian Archaeological Society, Indian Society for Prehistoric and Quaternary Studies, and The Indian History and Culture Society.
