Ancient Indian Colonization in South-East Asia c8.54

c8.54

No reliance can be placed on the chronology of these traditions according to which the first Hindu kingdom at Tagaung was founded many centuries before Buddha. There is, however, hardly any doubt that Burma, which was the nearest region to India, must have been colonized long before the first century A.D. when the Hindu colonists spread all over South-east Asia and advanced as far as Cambodia. Unfortunately, we do not possess any evidence for this early colonization of Burma. But the settlement of Indians in Burma before the second century A.D. is proved by Sanskrit place-names mentioned by Ptolemy which have been located with a tolerable degree of certainty in Burma. This is supported by the discovery of isolated Brāhmī alphabets of India on stones in Burma.