suspension were recovered at Nagarjunikonda in the Guntur district from a Buddhist stūpa ascribed to the 2nd-3rd centuries A.D. Another pierced gold imitation of an issue of Antoninus Pius was found with a pierced genuine aureus of Commodus at Chakerbedha, Bilaspur District, C.P. This list is not complete but sufficiently indicates the astonishing vogue of Roman coin-types over a large part of central India in the 1st and 2nd centuries. At the same time be it emphasized that, for all the vigour of its impact, the Roman trade implied by these odds and ends had no appreciable or durable effect upon the cultures of the peninsula. It left a superficial imprint here and there, sometimes in remarkably remote places, but nowhere south of the Vindhyas was that imprint more than a graffito upon an essentially self-sufficient native fabric. Only when we move northwards towards the foot-hills of the Himalaya do we find evidences of a more significant and lasting penetration of Western ideas, and to this difficult problem we must now turn. III. Malayadvipa: A Study in Early Indianization SIR ROLAND BRADDELL has in this article which was published in the Malayan Journal of Tropical Geography, Vol. IX, 1956, given a comprehensive and readable account of available evidence. Though the reading is long, it is an important phase of the Tamil story. THE EARLIEST EPIGRAPHICAL evidence of Indianization appears in southern Indo-China in the second century A.D. and in Malaysia c. A.D. 400. The former comes from the ancient site of Oc Eo and consists of a series of short Sanskrit inscriptions of a religious character inscribed on a number of the objects discovered.1 They are written in a South Indian Brahmi script and date palaeographically from the second to the fifth centuries A.D. Brahmi “is the earliest form of Indian writing known to us, and from it have been derived, by slow evolution through ages, all the Indian characters current today, including Tamil, Telugu, and Kanarese.”2 The rest of the earliest Sanskrit inscriptions known in South-East Asia are in the script called Pallava which, though convenient as a description, is in fact a misnomer. It is a box-headed script which was first called Vengi, that being used as a general name for the delta region of the ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 To avoid continual footnotes the reader is referred to the works set out in the bibliography at the end of this paper. 2 Majumdar, HCIP., vol. 1, p. 53. |