Malaya and India: Early Cultural Relations

Abstract

CONFIRMATION of a conclusion, which ran counter to generally accepted opinion, as to the archæological possibilities of Malaya in the study of early cultural development in south-eastern Asia, has been afforded by the results of a fourteen months’ archæological investigation undertaken by the Greater India Research Committee during 1937–38. Excavations were carried out in Kedah, Perak and Johore under the field direction of Dr. H. G. Quaritch Wales, by whom the results have been described recently (Illustrated London News, June 24), and with the financial assistance of the Governments of the States interested. The most extensive and important of the excavations were in Kedah, some thirty sites, ranging in date from the fourth to the thirteenth century of our era, being thoroughly examined. The earliest remains are scattered and do not suggest any very large settlement before the sixth century. The oldest site found was on an isolated hill on the Sala River, some twenty miles north of Kedah Peak. Here was found the massive laterite basement of a stupa and a small stone inscribed with a Buddhist formula in a South Indian script, not later than the second half of the fourth century. Another stupa site to the south on the Bujang stream produced a sun-dried clay tablet, inscribed with three stanzas of a Mahayana text in Sanskrit, which previously was known only in Chinese. This antedates previous evidence from Sumatra of the introduction of Mahayana Buddhism into Indonesia by more than a hundred years.