Dodecanese of the major islands under Italian rule back to twelve. Thus, when the Greek press began agitating for the cession of the islands to Greece in 1913, the term used was still the "Dodecanese". The Italian occupation authorities helped to establish the term when they named the islands under their control "Rhodes and the Dodecanese" ("Rodi e Dodecaneso"), adding Leipsoi to the list of the major islands to make up for considering Rhodes separately. By 1920, the name had become firmly established for the entire island group, a fact acknowledged by the Italian government when it appointed the islands' first
Island of the Jewel Island of the Jewel The Island of the Jewel () or Island of Sapphires () was a semi-legendary island in medieval Arabic cartography, said to lie in the Sea of Darkness near the equator, forming the eastern limit of the inhabited world. The island does not appear in any surviving manuscript of Ptolemy's "Geography" nor other Greek geographers. Instead, it is first attested in the Ptolemaic-influenced "Book of the Description of the Earth" compiled by al-Khwārizmī around 833. Ptolemy's map ended at 180° E. of the Fortunate Isles without being able to explain what might lay on the imagined eastern