Paris Peace Accords 23 Oct. 1991

Monday, October 20, 2014

The Indianized States of Southeast Asia - FUNAN

Seen and heard on Ms. Theary C. Seng's Facebook accounts: 
www.facebook.com/theary.c.seng
 
 
[It may be the case that I last read this book seriously over 20 years ago, a used textbook from Georgetown University days that I'm glad I kept all these years!]

The Indianized States of Southeast Asia:

The history of Cambodia at present is founded chiefly on epigraphy [inscriptions], whereas that of Champa profits from abundant documentation in Chinese and Vietnamese annals and that of Burma relies on chronicles.

 

These states have left only a few archaeological or epigraphical traces from before the fifth century. We know very little about most of them before that date except for the names mentioned by Ptolemy, by the Niddesa, and, most important of all, by the Chinese dynastic annals, which carefully register embassies from the countries of the South Seas. [...]

The most important of these kingdoms was unquestionably the one the Chinese called Funan. This name is the modern Mandarin pronunciation of two characters once pronounced b'iu-nam, which is the transcription of the old Khmer word bnam, the modern form of which is phnom, "mountain."

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