the founding of the Kingdom of Srivijaya, the history of which begins in the last quarter of the seventh century A.D. The range of opinion with regard to the dating of the granite Buddha places it not later than the fifth or sixth century A.D., and the antiquity of Bukit Seguntang as a holy place is thus carried back for nearly two centuries before it became the Mountain of the Kings of Srivijaya. It can be identified with the holy mountain Mandara of Malayadvipa accordingly. For Kancapada or Kancanapada, no more can be said except that it might have indicated some hill region beyond Bukit Seguntang. The Siva temple known as Gokarna, which was opposite Malayadvipa and on the shore, will be a place in the ancient Indian settlement of Kedah.

Both gold and silver were mined in Sumatra during the Dutch regime and the references to those metals in Malayadvipa are appropriate to the proposed identification. The Portuguese noted in the sixteenth century A.D. that Minangkabau was the best gold area in Sumatra. The curious expression 'ocean mines' occurs in other ancient Indian contexts but does not seem to have been explained by any Indian scholar. There are regions in Malaysia where grains of alluvial gold are to be found in the sands along the sea-shore. Eredia in the seventeenth century A.D. mentioned that he had seen Malays sifting the sands along the shore north of Malacca Fort and getting gold,²⁷ and to the writer's personal knowledge this could still be done at low tide twenty years ago. Sumatra is par excellence the gold island of Malaysia. Its Malay name is Palau Mas, 'gold island'; in the seventh century A.D. the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim I-Ching called it Chin-chou, 'gold island'; and Suvarnadvipa, a Sanskrit name for it, has the same meaning. Indian scholars unfortunately do not seem to be interested in historical geography and it is, therefore, not easy to trace the antiquity of the old Indian place-names or their subsequent history; but, apparently, it is not until Somadeva's Katha-sarit-sagara of the eleventh century A.D. that Suvarnadvipa is made clearly to apply to Sumatra; and that name therefore does not militate against the identification of the earlier Malayadvipa as Sumatra.

The high table-lands of western Sumatra have been suggested above as the scene of the earliest Indian penetration into the island and, upon the assumption that Malayadvipa was Sumatra, it would appear that during the period to which Chapter 48 of the VayuPurana must be ascribed the Indians had been able to mingle with the groups of people whom they called Mleccha but not with those

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²⁷ J. V. Mills, "Eredia's Description of Malacca, Meridional India and Cathay", JMBRAS., vol. 3 (1930), p. 233.