Sri Ksetra, 3 rd Century BCE to 6 th Century CE

Indianization, Synergies, Creation

Bibliographic Data

ID20053351
AuthorsJanice Stargardt (corresponding author)
Year2020
Pages220-266
Publication date2020-11-09
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenuePrimary Sources and Asian Pasts (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherDe Gruyter (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/9783110674088-009
OpenAlexW3200469674
ISBN9783110674088
LanguageEN
References cited7

George Coeds, the celebrated epigrapher of Sanskrit and Old Khmer, developed a theory of the Indianization of Southeast Asia in a colonial context in the 1930s, as a parallel to contemporary research on the Romanization of Europe. Qualified in the Asian case as a cultural, not a military, colonization, Coeds wrote: "In the majority of cases [in Southeast Asia], one passes without transition from a late Neolithic to the first traces of Hinduism [my translation and emphasis]." 1 He proposed processes of intensifying cultural colonization in the 2nd and 3rd centuries with enduring results by the 4th century. This view permeated the work of many scholars, e.g. K. N. Chaudhuri, up to 1990. 2 It is an undeniable fact that, at different times in the 1st millennium CE, societies throughout most of Southeast Asia that previously lacked systems of writingand had therefore been widely assumed by scholars of Indianization to lack organized social structures, religions, art, and architectureadopted Indian scripts and bodies of Indian sacred texts and adapted Indian religious thought, architecture, and art

Ancient history · Ancient Near East History · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Metallurgy and Cultural Artifacts

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