Book contents
2 - Southeast Asia before History
from PART ONE - FROM PREHISTORY TO C. 1500 CE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Edited by
Summary
This section of the work gives an account of the region up to the fifteenth century of the Christian era. The opening chapter, drawing on archaeological, anthropological and linguistic evidence, is concerned with the prehistory of its peoples. The next three have parallels in subsequent sections of the work. An account of the political structures of the region is followed by accounts of its economic and social history, and of its religious experience and popular beliefs.
Chapter 2 considers the environment of the region through time and it then attempts to integrate data from a range of disciplines in order to deal with a broad range of hypotheses on its prehistory. It discusses the extent of distributional correlation among human biological groupings, cultures and languages before the rise of the first historical states.
This is the subject of Chapter 3. It begins with an account of the Vietnamese polity and of its unique relationships with the Chinese empire. It then considers the development of other Southeast Asian polities. A comparative approach is attempted, limited by the relative paucity of material. But that in itself is connected with the attitude to history prevailing in the several polities concerned, and in turn that is a guide to understanding their nature. Champa, it is concluded, is not a kingdom in the conventional sense of the word. The Khmer polity at Angkor, dependent on ricefields, differed again. Pagan is compared with Angkor. In the Irrawaddy basin, more culturally diverse and competitive, the need to affirm the ethical nature of political authority was the greater. Both polities came to an end at the time of the advent of the Tai peoples into lowland Southeast Asia. Tai polities emerged, including Lan Na, Lan Sang and Ayutthaya, the last of which was the most enduring.
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- The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia , pp. 51 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993
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