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 called Ulcinj, in Montenegro), he has Ulcinium.

The Eblana Theatre is situated in the basement of Busaras, Dublin's central bus station, operated by Bus Eireann.

See also

• History of Dublin

For further information

• Ken Finlay's History of Dublin http://indigo.ie/~kfinlay/

Eblana is also an acronym for European Business Language Agency, based in Paris http://www.eblana.biz.