This thesis casts a new light on the role of Southeast Asia in the ancient Indian Ocean World. It brings together data and approaches from archaeology and historical linguistics to examine cultural and language contact between Southeast Asia and South Asia, East Africa and the Middle East. The interdisciplinary approach employed in this study reveals that insular Southeast Asian seafarers, traders and settlers had impacted on these parts of the world in pre-modern times through the transmission of numerous biological and cultural items. It is further demonstrated that the words used for these commodities often contain clues about the precise ethno-linguistic communities involved in their transoceanic dispersal. The Methodology chapter introduces some common linguistic strategies to examine language contact and lexical borrowing, to determine the directionality of loanwords and to circumvent the main caveats of such an approach. The study then proceeds to delve deeper into the socio-cultural background of interethnic contact in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean as a whole, focusing on the oft-neglected Southeast Asian contributions to the cultural landscape of this region and addressing the nature of pre-modern contact between Southeast Asia and the different parts of the Indian Ocean Word. Following from that, the last three chapters look in-depth at the dispersal of respectively Southeast Asian plants, spices and maritime technology into the wider Indian Ocean World. Although concepts and their names do not always neatly travel together across ethno-linguistic boundaries, these chapters demonstrate how a closer examination of lexical data offers supportive evidence and new perspectives on events of cultural contact not otherwise documented. Cumulatively, this study underlines that the analysis of lexical data is a strong tool to examine interethnic contact, particularly in pre-literate societies. Throughout the Indian Ocean World, Southeast Asian products and concepts were mainly dispersed by Malay-speaking communities, although others played a role as well.
Ancient Southeast Asia provides readers with a much needed synthesis of the latest discoveries and research in the archaeology of the region, presenting the evolution of complex societies in Southeast Asia from the protohistoric period, beginning around 500BC, to the arrival of British and Dutch colonists in 1600. Well-illustrated throughout, this comprehensive account explores the factors which established Southeast Asia as an area of unique cultural fusion. Miksic and Goh explore how the local population exploited the abundant resources available, developing maritime transport routes which resulted in economic and cultural wealth, including some of the most elaborate art styles and monumental complexes ever constructed. The book’s broad geographical and temporal coverage, including a chapter on the natural environment, provides readers with the context needed to understand this staggeringly diverse region. It utilizes French, Dutch, Chinese, Malay-Indonesian and Burmese sources and synthesizes interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives and data from archaeology, history and art history. Offering key opportunities for comparative research with other centres of early socio-economic complexity, Ancient Southeast Asia establishes the area’s importance in world history.
The period from the death of Alexander the Great to the rise of the Islam (c. late fourth century BCE to seventh century CE) saw a significant growth in economic, diplomatic and cultural exchange between various civilisations in Africa, Europe and Asia. This was in large part thanks to the Indian Ocean trade. Peoples living in the Roman Empire, Parthia, India and South East Asia increasingly had access to exotic foreign products, while the lands from which they derived, and the peoples inhabiting these lands, also captured the imagination, finding expression in a number of literary and poetic works. The Indian Ocean Trade in Antiquity provides a range of chapters that explore the economic, political and cultural impact of this trade on these diverse societies, written by international experts working in the fields of Classics, Archaeology, South Asian studies, Near Eastern studies and Art History. The three major themes of the book are the development of this trade, how consumption and exchange impacted on societal developments, and how the Indian Ocean trade influenced the literary creations of Graeco-Roman and Indian authors. This volume will be of interest not only to academics and students of antiquity, but also to scholars working on later periods of Indian Ocean history who will find this work a valuable resource.
Professor Shaffer tells the story of the fabled islands of Southeast Asia from 300 B.C., by which time their inhabitants had learned to sail the monsoon winds, to A.D. 1528, when Islam became dominant in the region. The story of Maritime Southeast Asia world during this period makes fascinating reading and is of immense significance in world history.
The history of Africa's historical relationship with the rest of the Indian Ocean world is one of a vibrant exchange that included commodities, people, flora and fauna, ideas, technologies and disease. This connection with the rest of the Indian Ocean world, a macro-region running from Eastern Africa, through the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia to East Asia, was also one heavily influenced by environmental factors. In presenting this rich and varied history, Gwyn Campbell argues that human-environment interaction, more than great men, state formation, or imperial expansion, was the central dynamic in the history of the Indian Ocean world (IOW). Environmental factors, notably the monsoon system of winds and currents, helped lay the basis for the emergence of a sophisticated and durable IOW 'global economy' around 1,500 years before the so-called European 'Voyages of Discovery'. Through his focus on human-environment interaction as the dynamic factor underpinning historical developments, Campbell radically challenges Eurocentric paradigms, and lays the foundations for a new interpretation of IOW history.
This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.
This volume comprises a selection of essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines that discuss the exchange relationship between Africa and the wider Indian Ocean world (IOW), a macro-region running from East Africa to China, from early times to about 1300 CE. The rationale for regarding this macro-region as a “world” is the central significance of the monsoon system which facilitated the early emergence of long-distance trans-IOW maritime exchange of commodities, peoples, plants, animals, technologies and ideas.
Ports of the Ancient Indian Ocean looks at the multisided role that 'ports' played in the exchange and transfer of knowledge between the 'Indian Ocean' and Mediterranean societies. Through the early Greek Periplus to minute descriptions by the Portuguese in the late sixteenth century or French archives of the colonial period, an accurate knowledge was gradually developed and transmitted on what is now called the Indian Ocean. The contributions focus on the nature of this knowledge, its history and status, using and combining new archaeological data and recent publications of textual material. They deal with material originating from the Red Sea to India, through Arabia and the Persian Gulf, shedding a new light on ancient ports and maritime contacts, with a special interest not only on India but on related areas as well, such as Sri Lanka and South-East Asia.