This reaction probably comes from the fact that Classic Age India's pattern of civilization doesn't turn out the same way as did Classic Age patterns in either China or Rome. In India, the two large centralizing empires were the exception, with the later one the Gupta smaller and weaker than the earlier one the Mauryan. This certainly is not the pattern of either the Mediterranean or Chinese lands, in which empires generally grew larger, more stable and more sophisticated. India's dominant religion also stays with a much upgraded version of its original many gods polytheism , while China moved towards the sophisticated political philosophy of Confucianism and the Mediterranean towards eventually three kinds of ethical monotheism.
This certainly was different from the increased although of course still very limited social mobility of both imperial Rome and Confucian China. So how does India fit into the era which your text identifies as having "the formation of new cultural communities"?
The answer is that during this time period India was indeed forming a distinctive identity and culture, although - quite unusually - doing it without having to be permanently under one central political authority, or having to abandon its earliest patterns of belief and society many gods and caste system.
In good part this was posible because of India geography, which as with earliest Egypt gave Indians enough physical separation and barriers to keep them fairly safe from intruders who might either overturn old ways, or force centralization in self defense , while also allowing enough trade contacts to promote greater prosperity than would be possible on just an agricultural base. In essence, given this early era's still pretty simple level of sea and land military power, early Hindu India was almost totally surrounded by barriers to frequent invasion.
The Himalaya Mountains were a huge barrier to the north, as were the Hindu Kush mountains to the Northwest. The "ice cream cone" of most of India hangs straight down into the Indian Ocean, which was a highway of coastal trade but not one of invasion seagoing invasions are mostly a pretty recent thing. Beyond the mouth of the Ganges River there were the jungles of what is now Burma directly to the east - again, for most of history, jungles rarely produced serious states that invaded in serious ways.
This really left only a western corridor from what is now Afghanistan and Persia, across either southerly semi-deserts more northernly mountain passes the most famous is the Khyber Pass. In this geographic situation, while civilizations were jelling to both the east China and the west Persia, Greece, Rome , India had several mostly uninterrupted millenia in which to form her civilization Alexander the Great was a brief exception without the recurring invasions that pushed both the Middle East and China towards more centralized border defenses.
The Foundations of India Civilization: Vedic India The age is called "Vedic" for the major source on which we base our very knowledge of the time.
The Vedas were at first songs or odes that were for a very long time passed down orally, but eventually by about BCE were written down and so are still available to tell us much of what is known about the earliest Aryan era in India.
Currently there is spirited debate about just what role the survivors of the Indus Valley era played in the Vedic age that replaced it. Until fairly recently, history books taught that Indus knowledge was wiped out by barbaric, intruding Aryan invaders, who trampled fields, burst dams, and enslaved the surviving ordinary population.
More recent scholars suggests a much less powerful, destructive role for the Aryan intruders. First, it seems increasingly likely that internal decline had greatly weakend complex Indus civilization before Aryan arrival, so badly so that irrigation and writing had already been lost almost completely lost by then about BCE. Stay tuned on this. But in the meantime it remains true that, following the end of the Indus Valley's complex ways of life, new patterns of complex civilization took many centuries to reappear again in Aryan-dominated India.
When they did, they did so in patterns mostly echoing the style of those originally-nomadic Aryan warriors, although perhaps also including significant cultural patterns picked up from the old Indus cultural base. One parallel people might be the Shang Chinese, who probably entered China sometime around when the Aryans were coming into India.
This is basically what the Aryans seem to have been and done, as over the years c. One Study topic asks you to Understand Vedic Indian social and religious beliefs and patterns as of c. The very early Aryans were a typical nomad "courage culture" - dominated by men, valuing mostly kinship ties and the physical skills of warriors and herders. As they settled down, like the early Zhou in China and also the Archaic era Greeks c. Once they settled permanently, they developed more interest in farming, and generally developed the kind of settled complex culture we call earliest civilization.
In political terms, they did the usual thing of forming hundreds of small states, under warrior rulers sharing some amount of authority with either or both priests and their own top warrior subordinates. But in their religion and society, the Aryans developed their own distinct patterns which have continued up into modern times: a caste society and a belief in reincarnation.
The Aryans' caste society probably started out not too different from the early class divisions of Shang China or Hammurabi's Babylon - it is just that while almost all other societies evolved to be more socially mobile, the Indians evolved to be less. By BCE Vedic India was continuing a system probably first established by the Aryan incomers a thousand years before, a system of 4 major Varna or classes.
These were defined by occupation and established by the family into which an individual was born. At the top were the two great early Aryan elite classes: priests Brahmin and warriors Kshatriya. Below them came Vaishya, consisting of ordinary Aryan people with occupations requiring some distinct skill - probably these were all the non-elite Aryans when the system was set up. The lowest regular class was that of Shudra, consisting of ordinary laborers and peasants. Many scholars believe that this class was originally made up on non-Aryans who were treated as a dark-skinned subject class.
Eventually below the Shudras came "untouchables" - people doing things considered extremely polluting, and so who literally were not supposed to come into direct contact touch with higher castes.
While many early civilizations had such class divisions, very often based at least partly on birth, in India even as early as BCE this system had grown unusually complex and entwined with basic Indian religious thought. The complexity came from the subdivision of each large varna class into many smaller birth groups, called jati , as well as the growing number of aspects of life determined by a person's jati.
Thus increasingly Indians worked, lived, ate, dressed, and married all within their own jati subdivision of their varna caste niche.
During this era women of higher castes seem to have had some abilities to be educated and status within their family properties, but overall women even in this early age were definitely more limited than, and always subordinate to, men. Religious ideas about reincarnation both explained and justified this. Basically, Vedic beliefs said that individuals had an essence an atman that was immortal, that is, that survived death.
Distribution of craft workshops within the site. At this stage, it is too early to determine whether the distribution of craft areas results from a specific organisation of production or from different periods.
Two specific findings appear all the more striking. The first is that the glass industry is apparently restricted to flat zones at the base of Hill 2 close to the river. The fire risk related to high-temperature glass-working does not alone explain the necessity to work outside habitation areas; evidence for metallurgical activities, which also use high-temperature furnaces was found on hills associated with habitation contexts.
A need for proximity to water as a manufacturing requirement. Weaving cultural identities on trans-Asiatic networks 2, 9. Although the combined stone and glass working workshop is located near the river, other stone-working workshops occupy the summits of Hills 3 and 4, and both iron workshops are located on Hill 3's western and eastern plateaux.
A second peculiarity is the discovery of both glass and hard stone ornament craft remains in the same context. Besides the fact that the two manufacturing processes are very different, ethnographic evidence shows that the two industries are also traditionally very distinct in terms of social groups Francis A possible explanation may lie in the type of ornament produced: bracelets and lapidary glass beads.
Our excavations uncovered two burials: one that could be securely assigned to the late prehistoric settlement, and one belonging to an earlier occupation. The first one is a funerary urn excavated in the northern edge of Valley 3 and containing the cremated bones of two children. The burial produced a 4th-2nd c.
BC calibrated radiocarbon date range Wk 21 8. The skeletal remains suggest that one child was possibly aged years old and the other years old9. The second burial, encountered in a layer below those associated with the glass bracelet and stone ornament-working activities, was exposed in a test pit located at the western base of Hill 2 TP 29 ; it produced sherds associated with two stone axes one knapped, the other one polished.
Several polished stone axes and big pots said to have been associated with ashes and fine ornaments, were found by villagers and crew members in an area at the base of Hill 2. Unfortunately, modern pits fully disturb this area, and no archaeological excavations can be carried out there. Water reservoir: potential mooring places? Further investigations are required to check whether, as the landscape and remote- sensing interpretations suggest, Valley 1 and potentially Valley 3 were flooded in Antiquity and, if so, whether they were possibly used as landing places.
So far, test pits and geological drillings show that Valley 1 might have been flooded. Its edges, where some glass and semi-precious stone craft activities took place, seem to have been occasionally flooded. It is possible that Wall 3, located upstream, might have been used to control the water level as well as to prevent silt from filling the landing place.
A possible use that needs to be checked is whether this valley, connected to the Tha Thapao river, might have been used as a mooring for small vessels accessing the Tha Thapao river to deliver foreign or other goods brought upstream from the coast e. Chronological sequence of occupation. It is very likely that Khao Sam Kaeo has been occupied during several periods, as indicated by materials recovered during survey or held in private collections.
However, of 18 radiocarbon dates, 14 place the site in the very early 4th to 2nd c. BC time bracket, a period that probably corresponds with the most activity Figure Except for two dates processed on samples collected within the embankments decomposed bedrock , that produced dates that are too early Wk 1 and Wk 1 l , the earliest excavated evidence for "occupation" derives from a probable burial offering of two axes mentioned above which was radiocarbon-dated to the 18th- 17th c.
BC Wk ". Several other small and large up to 30 cm stone axes have also been recovered in flat areas near the river. Certain ceramic types and seals that can be dated on the basis of stylistic elements suggest that the site was also inhabited in the early centuries AD but was perhaps less active.
Four inscribed seals and a bicolor stone sphere, two of them engraved with animal or anthropomorphic figures, were shown to us by villagers Figure Figure Inscribed seals and stone sphere from Khao Sam Kaeo private collections. One gold seal bears a Sanskrit inscription that is stylistically dated to the 5th to 6th c.
Two of the other three seals and the bicolour sphere all display the genitive forms of names in Prakrit language, written in an early Brahmi script that was used from the 1st c. BC to the 1st c. The first one, a green stone seal inscribed in a 1st c. The second seal is a green stone rectangular seal. Salomon Washington University has identified the first three syllables "i-si-da-"; for the next syllable, of which only the lower part remains, he suggested to read "ta".
The four syllables create "isidata", a frequent Indian name equivalent to the Sanskrit "r. Bellina The third seal is a four-sided rectangular red stone seal bearing an inscription that cannot yet be translated and an anthropomorphic representation that may be a deity Figure The bicolor stone sphere is also inscribed in Brahmi Figure Professor Iravatham epigraphist of the State Department of Archaeology, Tamil Nadu suggests that the first two characters of the inscription are: "ma-Tha" and that "the reading 'ma-Tha-ha' means "of MaTTha', probably a personal name".
However the word may be a personal name, as suggested by the genitive ending. The genitive ending "-ha" would indicate that the. Discussion : Khao Sam Kaeo as an early urban settlement. Three campaigns of survey and excavation at Khao Sam Kaeo allow us to present preliminary settlement-based inferences regarding social organisation of a late prehistoric settlement in peninsular Thailand that was involved in trans- Asiatic exchange.
Combining the results drawn from the socio-technological systems analysed by the project specialists and presented in this dossier will refine the interpretations presented below. The investigation of Khao Sam Kaeo provides evidence to fuel discussions on the origins of urbanisation and centralisation in maritime Southeast Asia, and in correlating these processes within the trans-Asiatic exchange framework.
The prevailing image of large Indianised urban sites suddenly appearing during the mid- 1st millennium AD, apparently without local precedents, is likely to have been distorted greatly, given the paucity of investigations at late prehistoric settlements. The extent to which Khao Sam Kaeo's population selected, landscaped and organised their environment prompts the discussion of urbanising trends at the site.
It seems reasonable to consider that Khao Sam Kaeo's founders not only selected a suitable environment for living but also chose a landscape that could be modified to provide defence and water management. The topography was exploited to make the most of its productive potential. There are clear indications of trans- generational investments in the scale of the communal earthworks.
Excavation has uncovered evidence for terrace and rampart maintenance, during different periods, followed by prolonged abandonment, and subsequent reconstruction of earthworks above or adjacent to the original structures.
Without doubt, our understanding of the developmental sequence, and more specifically the different earthwork and occupation phases, would benefit from more absolute dating and an improved geomorphological understanding of the dynamic local environment. At present, based on 14 radiocarbon dates, the early 4th to 2nd c. BC time span with a possible extension to the 1st c. The substantial dimensions of Khao Sam Kaeo, and the shocking damage done by looting, precludes against meaningful quantitative estimation of population levels, and the extent of landscape modification, or the scale of craft production.
Although problematic, ongoing research will attempt to investigate these issues. As a late prehistoric settlement, Khao Sam Kaeo is remarkably large and its earthwork system complex. Internal organisation is so far evidenced by the differential location of activities; possible occupation areas outside the ramparts and variable artefact distributions could reflect distinct social zoning or land use.
This latter issue is a major focus of the project's ongoing technological analysis. As it is true for some other Southeast Asian late prehistoric sites, Khao Sam Kaeo is located near a river system and has drainage channels to mitigate the effects of flooding.
However, the complex site configuration and earthwork system distinguishes Khao Sam Kaeo from its peers. Bearing in mind their different environment, the morphologies of many studied late prehistoric sites differ greatly from Khao Sam Kaeo. In Northeastern Thailand and Northern Cambodia, the earthworks at later sites consist of circular banks and ditches, which in some cases may correspond to engineered paleo-river channels Moore ; O'Reilly In contrast, Khao Sam Kaeo displays morphological and organisational features that can be compared to those of some mid- 1st millennium AD Southeast Asian Indianised urban settlements.
At the present stage of our investigation, we estimate that the total area of the settlement is about 54 hectares, very slightly exceeding the range known for well-dated late prehistoric sites in Northeastern Thailand. For comparison, sizes for the latter range from 18 to 50 hectares. In contrast, the areas of mid- 1st millennium AD sites in the Mekong delta Oc Eo with about hectares and the Pyu sites in Burma ranged from to hectares Stark Dvaravati moated sites in the central plains of Thailand were generally less than 47 hectares but could reach hectares; Nakhon Pathom with its estimated hectares being an exception Mudar In South Asia, data concerning the morphology, size, structure, and network integration of early historic urban settlements are still sparse.
Besides the lack of comprehensive surveys conducted to date, the changes made during long- term occupations and thus tell formation of settlements greatly limits what we can learn about their earliest phases. The dimensions of mid- 1st millennium BC South Asian settlements are rarely reported. From the mid- 1st millennium BC on, early walled cities proliferated, especially in the north Smith Earthwork shape varies as each walled city adapted to its local landscape.
No careful planning of cities predating the Mauryan period has so far been reported, with the exception of Sisupalgarh in Orissa Erdosy To our knowledge, contextual information on craft activities.
In the current absence of data and following a Marxist paradigm, Erdosy argued that if Arthas as tras ' requirements for a politically highly controlled production and distribution had been followed, one might expect these activities to concentrate in easily controlled areas Erdosy 1 1 1 1 - 1 1 2.
At Khao Sam Kaeo, current research seems to indicate that the craft areas were enclosed either by walls or by the river. However, further investigation and especially additional survey of the surrounding area will be required to ascertain whether this distribution is systematic or not. Little research has so far been focused on the local and regional networks integration of late prehistoric settlements either in South Asia Smith or in Southeast Asia.
As for the integration of Khao Sam Kaeo within local and regional networks, to date, no archaeological site has been reported in the vicinity radius 20 km ; the absence of neighbouring settlements cannot be explained at the present time and actually seems unlikely. However, survey at a local and regional level is still in its initial stages.
Urban growth implies a population capable of producing sufficient surplus to support its specialists. What was Khao Sam Kaeo's agro-ecosystem? Was it able to produce surplus and if so, can we evaluate its capacity to support regional and inter-regional networks? Did the settlement rely on a rural hinterland to fulfil its agrarian needs?
If so, what was the extent of these lands immediately adjacent or not , and was Khao Sam Kaeo exerting control over them?
Whether Khao Sam Kaeo was connected to inland communities that could supply mineral and forest materials for exchange is one of the questions yet to be addressed. Khao Sam Kaeo is located at the end of several possible trans-peninsular routes, forming a node that could have facilitated the control of upstream and downstream river or sea interactions.
Some of these routes link tin-rich areas to sites yielding early evidence of trans- Asiatic interaction, such as Phu Khao Thong. Considering Khao Sam Kaeo's landscaped environment as an expression of communal investment allows us to infer some aspects of its social organisation.
Communal architecture enshrines the symbolic values of the community that created it. The landscaped environment and civil architecture both bear witness to centuries of civic investment; for its residents, the landscape and architecture constituted a means for exhibiting the strength of a settlement that was actively integrated in regional and large inter-regional networks. Representing civic trans-generational investment, the earthworks display a sense of shared identity for urban residents Smith Research is at too early a stage to determine whether these collective works were centrally planned or not, or what they suggest about the political organisation of Khao Sam Kaeo society.
We are making. Nonetheless, it will remain hard to evaluate annual erosion and maintenance factors, and experiments will never provide satisfactory results in short term conditions.
An extremely erosive climate was likely a determining factor in this part of the Peninsula, nine months of rain, without considering dramatic typhoons, required constant maintenance for earthworks located on slopes.
Excavations have revealed successive repairs. The settlement of slopes and hilltops at Khao Sam Kaeo probably necessitated continual investment in flood defences. Nowadays, the hills are used only for rubber plantations and the people live in the valleys, although they are regularly flooded. Perhaps this behaviour reflects long-term experience of the local environment and suggests one of the reasons for the site's abandonment.
More broadly, could the aggressive local environment and climate partly account for a non-persisting settlement pattern? Would Khao Sam Kaeo's type of environment only have shortly been selected by some of the late prehistoric coastal populations of the Upper Peninsula involved in early trans- Asiatic exchange? To sum up, if one concurs that Khao Sam Kaeo shares comparable urbanisation evidence with that from mid-1 st millennium BC South Asian urban settlements, and to mid- 1st millennium AD Indianised Southeast Asian cities, then it follows that Khao Sam Kaeo can be considered an early urban settlement.
We cannot directly compare Southeast Asian sites to Indian ones where subsequent occupations have in the known cases produced too many changes to allow access to evidence representing the earliest mid- 1st millennium BC settlements Smith Bearing in mind the limited work so far conducted at mid- 1st millennium BC settlements, however, we are confident that no other contemporaneous Southeast Asian site has yielded as much evidence for urbanisation as Khao Sam Kaeo.
Whether it is accepted that this evidence bears some Indian imprints is a matter for further discourse. Obviously, we also need to take into account the results of the socio-technical systems studies still to be completed and to follow thereafter. The debate will focus on the nature of evidence on which grounds we consider cultural exchange with South Asia to be meaningful.
If only traditional arguments, i. In the mid- 1st millennium BC, to our knowledge, no one has ever unearthed a Brahmanical temple or Buddhist stupa in an urban context. Furthermore, in South Asia prior to the Gupta period from the 4th c.
AD , who knows what a Hindu temple is? In this period, most of the regions now labelled as South Asian were themselves under-going the "Indianisation" process. Defining cultural exchange during the late prehistoric period and how those interactions.
Evidence supports the assertion that Khao Sam Kaeo was a significant early polity bearing signs of urbanisation and possibly centralisation, and one involved in trans-Asiatic exchange. The Upper Kra Isthmus appears therefore to have played a prominent role in the burgeoning early trans- Asiatic economic and cultural networks of the mid- 1st millennium BC.
The following specialist studies in this volume present preliminary conclusions to interpret the economic and cultural interaction spheres of the Upper Peninsula. Technological analyses already provide original data allowing us to reconstruct some of the early transfers of complex technologies coming from South Asian, Southeast Asian, East Asian and Chinese horizons Han China and to infer some aspects of their social dimension.
Allchin, Frank R. Allen, Jane. Production and distribution of hard stone ornaments VI c. BC VI c. Bronson, Bennett. C, eds. C, Suchitta, P. Coningham, R.
Costin, Cathy Lynne. Dunn, Frederick L. Earle, Timothy. Erdosy, George. Glover, I. Gosselain, Olivier P. Higham, Charles. Indian Archaeology, a Review Hobson, Brill. Junker, Laura Lee. India 5, pp.
Lankton, James W. Southeast Asian exchange network". Lemonnier, Pierre. Leong, Sau Heng. Lucas, P. Moore, Elizabeth. Morrison, Kathleen D. Mudar, Karen M. Locational analysis of first millennium A. O'Reilly, DougaldJ. Peacock, B. Quaritch-Wales, H. Arts and Letters IX, 1, pp. Ray, Himanshu Prabha. Renfrew, Colin. Roux, Valentine ed. Saraya, Dhida. Schortman, Edward M. Press, pp. I, p. Srisuchat, Tharapong. Archaeology 13 translated by Masayuki Yokokura , pp.
Stargardt, Janice. Stark, Miriam, Griffin, Bion P. Tosi, Maurizio. Weaving cul titrai identities on trans-Asiatic networks Early metallurgy, trade and urban centres in Thailand and Southeast Asia, 1 3 archaeological essays, Bangkok, White Lotus, pp. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Society, 32 2 , pp. Wisseman Christie, Jan. This contention, however, may not be entirely true. International customary practice portrays that a State could be a sovereign when it fulfils a number of requirements.
This includes having a territory with a number of population, possessing a working government and having capacity to enter into legal relations with other countries. Kedah is one of the oldest surviving sultanates in the world founded in Prior to becoming part of Malaysia, it had a well-defined territory and population supported by a working government and had previously entered into various legal relations with other nations like Siam and the British.
Siam has been claiming that Kedah was part of their kingdom. Firstly, if this was the case, the British colonists would not have entered into treaties with the Sultan of Kedah for the purpose of the cession of both the island of Penang in and Prai strip in Secondly, if Kedah did belong to Siam, the Siamese should have insisted the British officials to conclude that treaty with them instead. The other Malay states of Kelantan, Terengganu and even Perlis fulfilled these requirements as they too possessed the capacity to enter into legal relations with other sovereigns.
This was evident through the long-standing practice of the two-way exchanges of gifts and bunga mas taking place between these Malay polities and Siam. Similarly, at the end of World War II, the British government despatched Sir Harold Mac Michael to obtain the consent of the Malay rulers to relinquish their sovereignty in streamlining the formation of the Malayan Union in They would not have done this if the Malay sultans were not sovereign rulers.
These facts proved that the Malay states were actually sovereign entities and therefore should be treated as such. As Kedah and the other Malay states were neither colonies nor territories under direct rule of Siam or the British, the British government and Siam therefore did not possess rights to delimit international boundaries across the Malay Peninsula without first consulting and seeking the permission of the Malay rulers whom their territories were affected by the terms of the treaty.
Conclusion Prior to the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of , the sovereignty of the Malay kingdoms in the northern part of Peninsula Malaysia extended beyond the present day Malaysian-Thai border running from the mouth of Sungai Golok in Kelantan to the hills of Bukit Puteh in Perlis.
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