The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

304 REVIEW ARTICLES
pirate from South Sumatra.) The pirates had their lair at Air Bersih,
and it is not in the nature of pirates to put up religious monuments or
move sacred images and inscriptions from one place to another.
More
likely they would have sold them to American tourists for their private
museums, if such a species existed in the 14th and 15th centuries.
Phase IV-Geding Sura: Cheng-Ho put down the. pirates, and a new
community of indigenous people carne into being at Geding Suro.
According to Bronson, "The people who moved into Geding Suro may
not have been exactly the same people, or had the same socio-economic
setup, as the people who moved out of Air Bersih a few years earlier."
According to Wolters, the Indonesians of Geding Suro were Moslems,
and they would not have moved any sacred Buddha images from place
to place. More likely they would have knocked the heads off the images
and sold those heads to American tourists for their private museums, if
such a species existed in the 16th and 17th centuries.
I will now quote a few more sentences from the last paragraph of
Wolter's paper.
"In the present study I have been dealing with an environment
of mud, and yet I have been unable to address myself satisfactorily
to the matter that bas come to preoccupy me. How did these
people think about themselves in an environment where no center
could ever expect to be permanently in the right place except the
peninsula on which Bukit Seguntang stood? This question rather
than the location of Srivijaya now seems to me to represent the
real mystery of the gulf of Palembang. Perhaps my question is an
unreal one. I hope, however, that a new level of enquiry will evolve
with its focus on understanding the nature of early Malay
civilisation. This topic is surely more worthwhile than speculation
about where each group of them lived or measurements of their
degree of participation in forign trade."
I have said that the sentence quoted above from page 2 of Wolters'
paper was ambiguous. It would seem that Wolters, realising that the
capital of Sri Vijaya can no longer be located at Palembang, bas now
hedged his bets into three ways : ·