Eblana

Eblana is the name of an ancient settlement on the site of modern-day Dublin.

The earliest reference to Dublin is in the writings of Claudius Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy), the Greek astronomer and cartographer, around the year A.D. 140, who calls it Eblana Civitas. This would seem to give Dublin a just claim to nearly two thousand years of antiquity, as the settlement must have existed a considerable time before Ptolemy became aware of it.

Some historians suggest that the name Eblana on Ptolemy's map is in fact a distortion of Deblana, itself a version of the Gaelic name Dubh Linn (Black Pool), from which the modern English language name Dublin derives.

It seems that ancient geographers often truncated the initial letters of place names. For example, instead of Pepiacum, and Pepidii (in Wales), Ptolemy writes Epiacum and Epidii; and for Dulcinium (now Ulcinj, in Montenegro), he has Ulcinium.

The Eblana Theatre was situated in the basement of Busaras, Dublin's central bus station, operated by Bus Éireann. A tiny theatre, famously without wings, it was open from 1959 until the early 1990's.

This article is licenced under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Eblana".