doms of the south they call him the Long-Necked King... his sons and grandsons are born and die like ordinary men; the king alone does not die." Here we seem to have an attempt to describe an 'Indonesian' master-priest or magician king, whose office was immortal though its occupants lived and died. It is stated in the account that the king knew how to write Indian books and an attempt is made to explain one such book. This, however, is not evidence that P'i-ch'ien was Indianized. On the contrary, the effect of the account is to show that it was not, because foreign traders were not allowed to enter the country and the kingly office was not Indianized but 'Indonesian' in character. His knowledge of Indian writing might well have been acquired for the purpose of his relations with the highly Indianized kingdom of Fu-nan. According to the tradition preserved in the Sejarah Malayu Palembang was an 'Indonesian' state at the time when the three Indian princes arrived and the four seventh century inscriptions of Srivijaya show clearly that the 'Indonesian' organization was retained, because the outer districts were governed by datus, an office unknown to India but fundamentally an 'Indonesian' one. It is not impossible that P'i-ch'ien should be looked for in the Palembang region, that this region gradually received Indian influences and that Buddhism became implanted there at some time prior to the erection of the huge granite Buddha on Bukit Seguntang, which was not later than the fifth or sixth century A.D. It must not be assumed that all the facts in Chapter 48 of the Vayu-Purana are exactly contemporaries. If the Mandara mountain were Bukit Seguntang, it would mean that by some time towards A.D. 400 the people of the Palembang region had become Mlecchas; and the passage about the Gokarna temple, if that were in Kedah, would be more or less synchronous. But the prehistory of Sumatra has not yet been worked out in the time periods, nor has that of Kedah.

The purpose of this paper is to provoke thought and, though its content is speculative, it is none the worse for that. The following words of the American Professor Hyde³⁴ form an apt quotation with which to conclude: "In cases of this kind where the evidence is meager it is well to remember that what is at issue is not a point of exact law, but an event of history, a field in which absolute truth is unattainable and interpretation must ordinarily resort to a certain amount of surmise." If any satisfactory picture of ancient times in Malaysia is ever to be drawn, it will only be by taking a broad common-sense view of the wood and applying reasonable surmise to the available facts, but most assuredly not by an academic

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³⁴ W. W. Hyde, Ancient Greek Mariners (New York, 1947), p. 239.