Official Government Documents Refer to The Philippines as Ophir and Maniloas

Contrary to what many including Timothy Jay Schwab who is The God Culture teach the Philippines is not Ophir. The lack of any archeological evidence to support this claim speaks volumes. That has not prevented the spread of this claim among the gullible. Surprisingly the false assertion that the Philippines is Ophir has made it into official government documents.

Here is a paragraph from a Philippine textbook on how to teach Social Studies.  

Using Important Concepts in Social and Human Sciences to Improve Learning Content and Processes in SOCIAL STUDIES

Long before the coming of the Spaniards, the Philippines was known among ancient geographers as Ophir or the land that supplied King Solomon with gold. The place name of Maniolas appeared in Magini's edition of the geographical works of Claudius Ptolemy in 105 AD. Ancient Chinese records referred to the Philippine islands as Ma-I (Land of the Barbarians), Chin-San (Mountain of Gold), Liu-Sung (Land Adjacent to the Mainland), and San-Tao (Three Islands) (NSO 1989).

This book was published in 2002 in partnership with UNESCO and the Philippine government. 

A Study Prepared by the

Social and Human Sciences Committee of UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines and the

Philippine Social Science Council

2002

This same claim, word for word, is also found in the1979 and 1994 Philippine Yearbook.

Philippine Yearbook 1979

Philippine Yearbook 1994

The year book is published by the National Census and Statistics Office. 

This claim also shows up in a book from 1977 word for word but with no footnotes or attribution as to its source. 

The New Jersey Ethnic Experience, 1977

This claim also appears word for word in a health report about the Philippines.

https://openjicareport.jica.go.jp/pdf/10461416_02.pdf

It appears that the origin of this quote is from a book by Gregorio Zaide in 1957.

Philippine political and cultural history, pg 3, 1957

But as you can see there are no footnotes on this page. Which ancient geographers and navigators long before Magellan called the Philippines Ophir? None. Josephus was very clear that Ophir was India. Ptolemy's geography does not extend past the Malay peninsula which makes the claim that his reference to Maniolas is the Philippines abusrd.

It appears the Jesuit Padre Colin was the first to posit that Maniolas is a reference to Manila. Here is his testimony.

What these Islands were called before the Spaniards arrived there is not easy to determine. Master Grijalva says that Archipelago of the Celibates; but it does not give us an Author, and those that we have read put the Celibates to the West of the Maluccas: a repugnant situation to the Philippines. Morga, Argensola, and others in their reports, suppose that they were called the Islands of the Luzones, all taking (like the Canary Islands, and others similar) the name of the main island, which, as we will see, has that of Luzon as its own. The Crownist of Felipe Segundo adds that they are also called the Manilas; and it is thus that many of the Portuguese, and other Nations in Eastern India, still title them in this way. But this surname from the Manilas gives us reason to reason that its antiquity in Eastern India is greater than that of the Portuguese themselves, since Claudius Ptolemy, who flourished only one hundred and sixty years after the Birth of Christ, and would make the Tables of his Geographia touching these parts, for information from the Persians, and Arabs, Vesines, and merchants from India, making a catalog of the Islands of these extra seas Gangem, puts in last place ten, called Maniolas, and their natives Manoilos: that considering all the circumstances, I do not see that they can be other than the Manilas. Let us hear his words: 

They are focused and here there are continuously other islands, ten in number, called Maniolae, in which they say that ships that have iron nails are detained, and with this idea they combine them with wooden ones, lest at any time the Herculean Stone, which is born around them, should attract them: and for this reason they asserted that they were fixed on the beams in the dry place. But they are said to hold the Anthropophagi, said to the Manioli. 

It is said that at this same height, and continuously after the said three Islands (of the Satyros) there are ten others called Maniolas, in which they are known to make ships with wooden dowels, and not with iron nails, because of the Lodestone, which grows nearby, and stops them. And out of this same respect, when the natives lower the boats onto land, they support them on large poles, or beams. The inhabitants of these Islands are said to be Anthropophagos, and their name is the Manolos. So much for Ptolemy.

The name of Maniolas is clearly the name of Manila, which our conquerors left it in veneration of its great antiquity: and because it is this, Even then, the most noble, and main population that they found in the Islands. 

Padre Colin, Labor Evangelica, pgs. 2-3

That is Padre Colin's thoughts on the matter but he is most certainly wrong. He begins by admitting that it "is not easy to determine" what the Philippines were called before the Spanish arrived. Then he latches on to Ptolemy's Maniolae and says that must mean Manila because they sound the same. Manila was not even established until the 13th century which is long after Ptolemy. His solution is that the City of Manila was named after the Maniolas but that etymology is wrong. 

Maynilà, the Filipino name for the city, comes from the phrase may-nilà, meaning "where indigo is found". Nilà is derived from the Sanskrit word nīla (नील), which refers to indigo dye and, by extension, to several plant species from which this natural dye can be extracted. The name Maynilà was probably bestowed because of the indigo-yielding plants that grow in the area surrounding the settlement rather than because it was known as a settlement that traded in indigo dye. Indigo dye extraction only became an important economic activity in the area in the 18th century, several hundred years after Maynila settlement was founded and named. Maynilà eventually underwent a process of Hispanicization and adopted the Spanish name Manila.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila#Etymology

What's curious here is how references to the Philippines as Ophir and Maniola made their way not only into official government documents but also into school textbooks promoted by UNESCO. Not only did the writer appropriate the history of Gregorio Zaide but he plagiarized it.