Krishna and Godavari rivers, the heart-land of the Telugu-speaking Andhras lying between Kalinga to the north and the Pallava country to the south. In 1918 Vogel laid great emphasis on the Pallava connection with South-East Asia and adopted for the script the name of Pallava.3 The name has remained in use ever since, but it is known now that this script is not specifically Pallava but was prevalent on the Coromandel coast and in use by the Andhras amongst others.4 In point of fact, the earliest Pallava inscriptions in India are in Prakrit on copperplates and dated palaeographically A.D. 250-350, after which copperplates in Sanskrit come from A.D. 359-600, and then stone and copperplate from the seventh century A.D.5 From 1888 it was customary to regard the inscription of Vo-canh, in the Nha-trang region of southern Annam, as the oldest of the Sanskrit ones in the Pallava script and to assign it palaeographically to the third century A.D. For long it was regarded as a Champa inscription. Then Professor Coedés argued that it was in reality a Fu-nan one, and identified the Sri Mara of the inscription with Fan Shih-man, king of Fu-nan in the third century A.D. This became accepted until Dr. D. C. Sircar, disputed it, and now the whole theory has been criticized so destructively and logically by Professor Emile Gaspardone6 that it will be wiser to place the Vo-canh inscription alongside the ones in Pallava script which in c. A.D. 400 begins to appear in Malaya, Borneo and Java. Like the earliest epigraphical evidence, the first positive evidence of Indianization in South-East Asia comes from the ancient site at Oc Eo, which was discovered and explored by the French archaeologist Louis Malleret. This site lies at the foot of the small massif of Bathé, between Long Xuyen and Rash Gia. It was connected by canals with the Bassak River and with another ancient site at Ta Kéo, some eleven kilometres from the shore of Rash Gia Bay. Ta Kéo, was connected by canal with the shore of the Bay and appears to have been the port for Oc Eo, which the finds prove to have been an industrial and commercial centre in maritime relations with Siam, Malaya, India, Indonesia, Iran, and certainly the Mediterranean, either directly or through the intermediary of India. The preponderant part, however, was played by South India, and probably the Coromandel coast. The evidence shows that South Indians were settled ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3 J.P. Vogel, "The Yupa Inscriptions of King Mulavarman from Koetei (East Borneo)", Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch- Indie (Batavia, 1918), Diel 74, pp. 167-232. 4 K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, History of Sri Vijaya (Madras, 1949), pp. 17, 27. 5 R. Sathianathaier, HCIP., vol. 3, p. 257. 6 E. Gaspardone, "La plus ancienne inscription d'lndochine", Journal Asiatique (Paris, 1953), pp. 477-85. |