A Burmese wonderland; a tale of travel in Lower and ... - Khamkoo

98 A BURMESE WONDERLAND.
an important part in fixing precisely the dates of manyevents
ia the early history of Burma.
The amalgamation of the Burmese begun at Pagan
by Pyinbya in the 9th century, was completed by
Anawratta in about 1057, when he suddenly swept
down and destroyed the Pyu at Prome, and the Taking
at Thaton. The last event resulted in a tremendous
impetus to rehgion, art, architecture and Uterature, and
is the immediate cause of the architectural and intellectual
splendour of Pagan. But it is impossible now to
maintain that the Burmese in 1057 were savages. They
had before then a corrupt form of Mahayana Buddhism.
They had achieved the arts of war and government.
In short, though the Burmese received a highly developed
civilization from the Taking, it is no longer
possible to ignore the influence of the Pjm. The greatness
of Pagan, however, began with the fall of Thaton.
Before then, the Burmese language, it appears, was not
written. In spite of the dry cUmate no single inscription
of earlier date has been found, though numerous
writings in Pyu and Taking of far greater antiquity
have survived the heavy rains of Lower Burma. Then,
in the 11th and following centuries. Upper Burma was
suddenly littered with lithic inscriptions in Burmese,
showing that one result of Anawratta's conquest was
the invention, or rather adoption, of writing for the
vulgar tongue. During the succeeding two and a half
centuries thousands of pagodas were built, whose ruins
cover a great area, whose survivors are still magnificently