ese _Isla das Sete Cidades_), a legendary island in the Atlantic
ocean. The origin of the name is quite uncertain. The oldest suggested
etymology (1455) fancifully connects it with the name of the Platonic
Atlantis, while later writers have endeavoured to derive it from the
Latin _anterior_ (i.e. the island that is reached "before" Cipango), or
from the _Jezirat al Tennyn_, "Dragon's Isle," of the Arabian
geographers. Antilia is marked in an anonymous map which is dated 1424
and preserved in the grand-ducal library at Weimar. It reappears in the
maps of the Genoese B. Beccario or Beccaria (1435), and of the Venetian
Andrea Bianco (1436), and again in 1455 and 1476. In most of these it is
accompanied by the smaller and equally legendary islands of Royllo, St
Atanagio, and Tanmar, the whole group being classified as _insulae de
novo repertae_, "newly discovered islands." The Florentine Paul
Toscanelli, in his letters to Columbus and the Portuguese court (1474),
takes Antilia as the principal landmark for measuring the distance
between Lisbon and the island of Cipango or Zipangu (Japan). One of the
chief early descriptions of Antilia is that inscribed on the globe which
the geographer Martin Behaim made at Nuremberg in 1492 (see MAP:
_History_). Behaim relates that in 734--a date which is probably a
misprint for 714--and after the Moors had conquered Spain and Portugal,
the island of Antilia or "Septe Cidade" was colonized by Christian
refugees under the archbishop of Oporto and six bishops. The inscription
adds that a Spanish vessel sighted the island in 1414. According to an
old Portuguese tradition each of the seven leaders founded and ruled a
city, and the whole island became a Utopian commonwealth, free from the
disorders of less favoured states. Later Portuguese tradition localized
Antilia in the island of St Michael's, the largest of the Azores. It is
impossible to estimate how far this legend commemorates some actual but
imperfectly recorded discovery, and how far it is a reminiscence of the
ancient idea of an elysium in the western seas which is embodied in the
legends of the Isles of the Blest or Fortunate Islands.

ANTILLES, a term of somewhat doubtful origin, now generally used,
especially by foreign writers, as synonymous with the expression "West
India Islands." Like "Brazil," it dates from a period anterior to the
discovery of the New World, "Antilia," as stated above, being one of
those mysterious land