Sri Ksetra: The Ancient City of Pyu Rising in a Marvelous Dignity for Myanmar-Buddhism
Thiri Shwe Sin Nyunt independent.academia.edu
Sri Ksetra: The Ancient City of Pyu Rising in a Marvelous Dignity for Myanmar-Buddhism
In the early first millennium, a civilisation based around large brick-walled cities began to emerge in Upper Myanmar. Known as the Pyu, this culture gained mastery over irrigation techniques at an early stage in its development. This allowed for increased agricultural production to support its burgeoning urban centres. Coupled with its adoption of the incoming religious currents of Buddhism, and to a lesser extent Hinduism, it rose to become the most prominent culture in the region for almost a thousand years. This essay traces its rise by exploring its art, architecture, and urban landscapes, focusing on the three main Pyu cities, Sri Ksetra, Beikthano, and Halin.

This article traces the evolutionary record of urbanism at two sites in Myanmar: their transition from late prehistory in c. second to first century BCE to proto-urban and fully urban development at Sri Ksetra and Beikthano by the mid-first millennium CE. The Pyu cities are remarkable because of their spatial continuity, for their early achievements in water control, iron production, ritual and domestic ceramics, brick monumental architecture, rich funerary culture, literacy and adoption of Buddhism on both elite and popular levels. Though the radiocarbon dates for Pyu urbanism are at present earlier, they share many features with other urbanising societies in mainland Southeast Asia, where new chronologies are emerging for social and economic complexity at Dvaravati, Pre-Angkorian and Co Loa sites. The article provides new and specific evidence on the dates and types of contacts between the Pyu, India, and other areas of Southeast Asia to interrogate the meaning of Indianisation in Southeast Asia.

The people known as the Pyu1 probably drifted from southern China into the side valleys of the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River in the dry zone of Upper Burma during the first millennium b.c. (see map on p. x). Small population groups speaking related languages in the Tibeto-Burman group still live in Yunnan, notably the Lolo. The Pyu cultural heritage was greatly valued by the kings and nobles of Bagan (mid-9th–late 13th century), and it is probable that many Pyu people were peacefully assimilated into Burmese society at that time; certainly, the Pyu language still figured in major inscriptions at Bagan. The Pyu left a body of ancient inscriptions in Pali, Sanskrit, and Pyu dating from around the mid-fifth to the twelfth century, but only those in Pali and Sanskrit have so far been translated. The Pyu language remains one of the few Southeast Asian languages not yet recovered. It can be transliterated, because the sound value of most of the letters of Indian origin is known, but tonal languages have a large number of homonyms, whose meanings are not easy to distinguish. The language is related to Myanmar (Burmese), but the two would not have been mutually comprehensible

The paper opens by recounting the beginnings of Buddhism in Dawei as preserved in local chronicles and sustained in stupas marking the episodes of the chronicle narrative. The chronicles start with a visit of the Buddha whose arrival triggers a series of events bringing together pre-existing tutelary figures, weiza, a hermit and offspring born of a golden fish, culminating in the establishment of the first Buddhist kingdom circa the eighth to tenth century CE. The enshrinement of sacred hairs gifted by the Buddha also includes patronage by a king of the ‘Suvannbhumi’ lineage. Associated with the monks Sona and Uttara from Sri Lanka sent by King Asoka’s son Mahinda, ‘Suvannbhumi’ literally can refer to the archaeology of Thaton, a walled site in the present day Mon State, or, as is the case here, more widely to the missionary tradition associated with Asoka (Sao Saimong Mengrai 1976). The third story in the establishment of the Buddhist king at Thagara is the longest of the chronicle, the tale of a royal hunter who failed to capture a golden peacock for the queen. The hunter became a hermit living by a pond with a golden fish and as he urinated in the pond, two children were born from the fish. The boy becomes the first Buddhist king of Thagara, 11 km north of Dawei, where artefacts from survey and excavation confirm the chronology of the chronicle, with the closest archaeological parallels found not at the ancient sites of the Mon State but to the first millennium CE Buddhist ‘Pyu’ heritage of Upper Myanmar which is notably absent in the chronicle compilation.

Myanmar today is a vibrant patchwork of peoples, cultures, and beliefs. Its history stretches back through the millennia and in many ways is the story of its cities, and by extension, the kings who built them. Following their rise and fall, this essay moves through the centuries as it explores the art and archaeology of these many varied and at times competing centres. After a turbulent half-century, the country has reopened once again to the world, affording us a chance to experience its unique art and culture first hand.

The Pyu ancient cities, Halin, Beikthano, and Sri Ksetra are located in the dry zone of Irrawaddy River basin. These brick-walled centres flourished for most of the First Millennium CE. These three Pyu Cities were inscribed as a serial World Heritage Site in June 2014. This process involved the preparation of documentation to map the distribution and extent of archaeological heritage resources and their relationship with the environment. Archaeological heritage resources are not always possible to locate only by ground survey. With limited resources and time, geographic documentation of these resources became challenging. An integrated approach was taken, using high resolution satellite imagery and topographic maps in combination with existing archaeological resources documentation and ground survey by Global Positioning Systems (GPS). The results showed that archaeological cultural heritage resources could be spatially located. The resources identified on the newly-created digital maps were classified according to archaeological properties such as palace site, city wall, hydrological system, excavated structure, unexcavated mound. The maps also classified the archaeological cultural heritage resources according to their potential outstanding universal values (OUV) of World Heritage criteria. This integrated approach was proved to be a successful tool in mapping the archaeology of the Pyu ancient cities. This method is easily replicable and adaptable to the other archaeological cultural heritage sites.