A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c9.28

c9.28

In Chinese historical sources occur references to maritime traders bringing typical Indian products to China as far back as the seventh century B.C. Generally regarded with incredulity, these accounts receive striking confirmation by the discovery in the Philippines of a number of Iron-Age finds bearing close resemblance to objects found in South India of about the same age—the first millennium B.C. These comprise iron implements and weapons such as knives, axes, daggers and spear-points; glass beads and bangles, both green and blue; and finally beads of semi-precious stones such as agate, cornelian, amethyst, and rock-crystal. In the earlier Iron-Age strata only green glass, whose colour is due to iron, occurs; in the later, a blue glass, whose colour is due to copper, also occurs. Both the iron and glass objects are similar to and in some cases identical with the prehistoric glass and iron finds in the South of India. These occur in the dolmen tombs and in burials which are found by the hundreds of thousands, and which almost certainly antedate the historic Chera, Chola and Pāndyan kingdom, whose history goes back to the beginning of the Christian era or before. As finds of similar glass beads and bangles have recently been made in the Malay Peninsula, in dolmen tombs in Java, and in North Borneo, the inference is inescapable that we have clear evidence of a trade contact between the northern Philippines and Southern India running well back into the first millennium B.C. The extensive trade and colonization and later conquests of the South Indian kingdoms, in Sumatra and Java as well as in Indo-China in the early centuries of the Christian era, are of course well known. The new material, however, seems to make it clear that this was far from being the beginning of such contacts, but rather the last stages in an associaion reaching as far as the northern Philippines, which had begun many centuries before.