The island of Java has been referred to by a variety of names throughout its history. These names reflect the changing knowledge about Java of peoples throughout Eurasia, sometimes drawing on legendary or secondhand information, rather than direct experience. The earliest references to Java in written texts date to around the beginning of the Common Era, or possibly slightly earlier, all found in foreign sources. It is only from around the middle of the second millennium CE, as Chinese and Europeans established close, regular and permanent contact with the Javanese, that the global nomenclature of Java stabilised.
Southeast Asian
Inhabitants of Java and neighboring islands refer to the island as Jawa [d͡ʒa wa], and there are several theories about the ultimate etymology of the word. The linguist Robert Blust argued that the toponym is based on the reflex of jawa "foxtail millet" (jawawut in modern Indonesian), which derives from the Proto-Austronesian root *zawa. The historian Michael Laffan however argued that the vernacular form Jawa was derived from an older form *yaba, based on the directionality of sound changes in Malay and Javanese.
An early attestation of the toponym Jawa from Southeast Asian sources is found in the Kota Kapur inscription. Issued in 686 AD in the Old Malay language and found on the island of Bangka, the inscription mentions a military conflict that arose due to the refusal of Java to pay homage to Srivijaya:
In the epigraphic record from the island of Java itself, both Old Javanese phrases ( "land of Java" or "island of Java") and Sanskrit equivalent () are used to refer to the island. The first known use of in a text originating from Java is in the Canggal inscription, a Sanskrit panegyric issued in 732 AD by a king in Central Java. Here the Sanskrit name is followed by description of the island which draws heavily on Sanskrit poetic models, quite possibly including passage of the Ramayana. An early attestation of in Javanese source can be found in the Shivagrha inscription (856 AD).
Both toponyms Jawa/Java and Yawa/Yava appear in mainland Southeast Asian inscriptions of a similar period. While some scholars such as Michel Ferlus have suggested these names may refer to localities on the mainland, Arlo Griffiths argues that they most likely refer to the island of Java as known today. A famous Cambodian source mentioning Java is the 11th-century Sdok Kok Thom inscription (K. 235), which recounts a legend of the Jayavarman II's declaration of Cambodia's independence from Java in 802 CE. Other references to Java, both as Java and Yavadvīpa, are found in a number of Cambodian inscriptions dating from the ninth to twelfth century, plus one possible example dating as early as in 626 AD (inscription K. 60). Inscriptions from Champa spanning the ninth to fifteenth centuries describe diplomatic relations with Java, as well as the presence of Javanese amongst the ethnically diverse slave population of Champa.
South Asian Java first appears in South Asian literary works around the turn of the Common Era. In Sanskrit texts, Java was referred to as Yavadvīpa, with meaning "island" and meaning "barley". As barley is not a native crop of Southeast Asia, it has been argued that the word may have been chosen by Sanskrit writers simply as a phonetic approximation to a pre-existing Southeast Asian term jawa (or something similar), without the meaning "barley" having any real significance.
In the famous South Asian epic Ramayana, king Sugriva of the vanara (monkeys), as the chief ally of the eponymous hero Rama, instructs his troops to go to Yavadvīpa in search of Rama's kidnapped consort Sita:
Java is mentioned in the ancient Tamil epic Maṇimēkalai by the poet Satthanar, which states that Java (rendered as சாவகம் ) had a kingdom with a capital called "Nagapuram". The toponym also appears in the Pāli scripture Mahāniddesa (likely pre-1st century BCE) as a place to be reached by boats.
Ancient European It is probably through Indian intermediaries that Java first became known to the West. An island called (), which apparently refers to Java, is mentioned in Claudius Ptolemy's Geographia ( CE), composed during the height of the Roman Empire. The Greek term possibly derives from a Middle Indo-Aryan language and seems to be a synonym of the Sanskrit . In this text, is described as being rich in gold and "having a city called Silver" () located at its western end.
Ptolemy mentions two other relevant toponyms in the vicinity of the Indonesian archipelago: Σαβαδιβαὶ () and Ζάβαι (). While some scholars have attempted to identify these names with precise modern locations, it may well be that they all represent variants of the same toponym based on a word for Java.
Ptolemy was one of a number of Roman writers that describe cities of gold and silver (Chryse and Argyre) in the far east; others included Pomponius Mela (), Pliny the Elder ( AD) and Gaius Julius Solinus ( AD). The similarities to the Rāmāyaṇa'''s description of Yavadvīpa as a land of gold and silver () suggest the possibility that Indian stories may have been the source of these legendary images.
East Asian
Chinese sources provide another body of data about the toponym Java, though not fully independent of Indian influence. The oldest source to mention Java is the Han Records of the Eastern Lodge ( ), compiled in the first or second century CE, which uses the term (). The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Faxian mentions a brief visit to an island he calls (). The similarity of the pronunciation of these toponyms to the Greek Iabadiu suggests a common Middle Indo-Aryan source word.
In the 5th century, there emerged a new Chinese toponym (), as found in the court chronicles Book of Song (late 5th century) and Book of Liang (7th century). The Middle Chinese pronunciation of this word much more closely matches the Old Javanese jawa (), which may indicate that the Chinese were beginning to have direct knowledge of the island. Chinese texts also reference a kingdom on Java's northern coast known as () from 640–818 AD. The island was referred to as () until the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), whereupon it began to be called (), the present-day name in Mandarin Chinese.Lombard, Denys (2005). Nusa Jawa: Silang Budaya, Bagian 2: Jaringan Asia. Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama. An Indonesian translation of Lombard, Denys (1990). Le carrefour javanais. Essai d'histoire globale (The Javanese Crossroads: Towards a Global History) vol. 2. Paris: Éditions de l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. p. 12. In his 1451 book The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores, Chinese explorer Ma Huan, who accompanied the famous Admiral Zheng He on three of his Ming treasure voyages, noted that the Chinese referred to Java as (), and that it had previously been called ().
The Chinese names for Java were borrowed by neighbouring peoples who shared Sinitic cultural traditions. The Complete Annals of Đại Việt, a Vietnamese imperial chronicle, records a military incursion in 767 CE of people from , while other entries in the same text use the later term . Both these Vietnamese names for Java share the same logographic characters and similar pronunciation as the Middle Chinese () and Early Modern Chinese ().
West Asian
Historians have proposed a number of terms that could refer to Java in works by medieval Arabic geographers. Many of these terms however are used inconsistently between sources and difficult to verify; the same term could refer to Java, islands adjacent to Java, or entirely fictitious locations as writers frequently adopt terms from earlier accounts without personal experience of visiting the region.
In the Middle Ages, Muslim writers began to refer to the islands of Indonesia by the term Zābaj (), found in works such as Buzurg ibn Shahriyar's 10th century The Book of the Wonders of India (Kitāb Aja'ib al-Hind Barrihi). One of the earliest mentions of the term Zābaj is in the first part of the travelogue Accounts of China and India (), written in 237 AH/851–852 AD. The second part of the same work, written by Abu Zayd al-Sirafi in the late 9th or early 10th century, gives a more detailed account of Zābaj as a large political entity spanning multiple islands in Southeast Asia. Some historians identify Zābaj as Java, although other identifications such as Srivijaya have also been proposed.
Ibn Khordadbeh in his Book of Roads and Kingdoms (9th century), uniquely among the early Muslim geographers, used the term (). This may be an alternative spelling of or possibly conceived as a separate entity. The usage was not widely adopted by other Arabic writers; after Ibn Khordadbeh, "no more is heard of Jāba, unless the name is echoed in the later name of Jāwa".
Another name used in Arabic sources is (), which was used as a label for certain islands of maritime southeast Asia in maps such as Tabula Rogeriana by Al-Idrisi. Like Zābaj, however, the toponym Wāqwāq tend to be used very broadly and more often used for imagined places.
Around the 13th century, Middle Eastern vessels began to visit Javanese ports more regularly and the term Jāwa (), more in line with local pronunciation, began to displace Zābaj in Arabic sources such as Dictionary of Countries (Kitāb Mu'jam al-Buldān) compiled by Yaqut al-Hamawi. But rather than being solely a term for the island of Java, the Arabic term Jāwa "seems to have functioned both as a regional toponym and as a collective noun in the 14th century." The famous Travels of Ibn Battuta refers to al-Jāwa and Mul Jāwa as separate islands, indicating that the term Jāwa had become a generic Arabic term for the Indonesian archipelago by this time.
Medieval European
Late medieval Europeans used the term Iava/Iaua (sometimes misspelled Iana) in Latin and their vernacular languages to refer to Java and its neighbouring islands. In the famous Travels of Marco Polo, a distinction is made between the "great island of Iaua" (), referring to Java as understood today, and the "lesser island of Iaua" (), identified with Sumatra. This practice seems to reflect Islamic influence, as seen by Ibn Battuta's similar handling of the Jāwa toponym in Arabic. One of the few European travellers who actually visited Java during this time, Odoric of Pordenone, uses the term Iaua only to refer to Java proper. The "two Iauas" schema continued to influence European geographical thinking well into the 16th century, with the labels "great Java" and "lesser Java" being applied vaguely and inconsistently by travellers such as Niccolò de' Conti, writers like Duarte Barbosa, and map-makers such as Johne Rotz.
Some Europeans used the names Saba and Shabait instead of Iaua, which may reflect the persistent influence of the older Arabic term Zābaj. When 14th-century Italian traveler Giovanni de' Marignolli returned to Europe from Asia, he claimed to have stopped at a land called "Saba" for several months, which he said had many elephants and was led by a queen. The 15th-century Russian merchant Afanasy Nikitin traveled to India in 1466 and described a land which he called () in his A Journey Beyond the Three Seas''.Braginsky, Vladimir. 1998. Two Eastern Christian sources on medieval Nusantara . Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde. 154(3): 367–396.
Summary The table below summarizes attested forms and excludes putative reconstructed forms.