Notes on ancient times in Malaya. Part 1
Roland Braddell published this first instalment of his Notes on Ancient Times in Malaya in 1947, continuing a project begun in 1935 that had been interrupted by the Japanese occupation. Writing from the position of a veteran scholar of Malayan antiquity, Braddell addresses the pre-history and proto-history of the Malay Peninsula, arguing that the region’s ancient past is far richer than the “no history” narrative suggests and that the slab-graves of Perak represent the work of South Indian gold-mining communities dating to the early first millennium A.D.
Summary
Braddell opens by establishing a methodological principle that runs through the entire article: geographical and navigational evidence must take precedence over etymological speculation when identifying ancient toponyms. He criticises the prevailing tendency to locate places like Ho-ling or Ch’ih-t’u on the basis of phonetic similarity alone, even when gnomon readings or other positional data in Chinese sources point elsewhere. This framework is then applied to the identification of Ptolemy’s Khrysoanas, which Braddell—building on the work of Dato Douglas and H. D. Noone—identifies with the Bernam River rather than the Perak River, a conclusion he had previously reached but which he now supports with additional evidence from the slab-grave sites in the Bernam valley (pp. 163–164, 173–174).
The substantive core of the article concerns the Perak slab-graves, which Braddell regards as “the most interesting and in many ways the most important archaeological discoveries yet made in the Malay Peninsula” (p. 172). He tackles three questions—who built them, what they were doing, and when they were built—by synthesising evidence from the graves themselves (iron implements, beads, pottery), the surrounding mining landscape, comparative material from South India, and the bead typologies established by H. C. Beck. The iron socketed tools known locally as tulang mawas are explained, via a letter from the late V. B. C. Baker, as timber-shaping implements used by miners, resolving a long-standing puzzle (p. 173). The absence of gold objects in the graves is dismissed as uninformative, since Braddell argues that Malayan gold was extracted and exported rather than worked locally (p. 175).
Braddell then brings in the excavations at Virampatnam (Pondichery) and Oc-Eo (Funan) to anchor the dating. The Virampatnam site, with its Arretine pottery, Brahmi graffiti, and bead-manufacturing evidence, demonstrates that a semi-precious stone trade and related industries were active in South India during Ptolemy’s period, and that the bead types found in Malaya match those of the Andhra period (pp. 179–181). The Oc-Eo finds—including a Sassanid cabochon, a Roman gold medallion bearing the name of an Antonine, and a dated object corresponding to 152 A.D.—confirm that the maritime trade network connecting the Roman world, South India, and the Straits of Malacca was fully operational by the second century A.D. (pp. 181–182).
Key Findings
- The Kedah stone point, dredged from the Padang Pelandok tin-mine near Sintoh village, is provisionally accepted as a Malayan neolithic artefact; Chinese records of the state P’an-p’an (first embassy 424–453 A.D.) confirm that stone arrow-heads were still in use in the north-east Peninsula during the early fifth century, demonstrating a blending of stone and iron cultures (pp. 169–171).
- H. C. Beck’s bead analysis allocated the Slim and Changkat Mentri grave beads to the same period as the Kuala Selinsing and Johore finds, i.e. between 1 and 400 A.D., placing the slab-graves squarely in the proto-historic Hindu period (p. 180).
- The Virampatnam (Pondichery) excavations of 1941–42 yielded Arretine pottery datable to c. 1–50 A.D., Brahmi graffiti ascribed to 200 B.C.–200 A.D., and a bead-manufacturing complex including “collared barrel” types distributed from India to the eastern Mediterranean (pp. 179–180).
- At Oc-Eo, Funan, the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient discovered a gold medallion with the effigy of an Antonine and a Latin inscription (letters “AVREL…” legible), a dated object corresponding to 152 A.D., and a Sassanid pate-de-verre cabochon of c. mid-fourth century A.D., linking the Straits trade network to both Roman and Iranian worlds (pp. 181–182).
- The tulang mawas iron implements, long unexplained, were identified by V. B. C. Baker as timber-shaping tools held by a rotan loop under the armpit and worked from the elbow, consistent with the “iron forearm” legend among the Malays (p. 173).
- Ptolemy’s two emporia at the northern and southern ends of the Straits of Malacca (Takkola and Sabana) are corroborated by the bead and glass finds at Kota Tinggi (Johore) and the slab-grave sites in Perak, respectively, with Roman beads comprising 20 per cent of Gardner’s Johore collection (pp. 178–179).
Conclusion
Braddell’s definitive provisional conclusion is that the Malayan slab-graves should be dated from the beginning of the first millennium A.D. and their builders identified as South Indians engaged in gold mining, a view he presents as consistent with the bead typologies, the mining context of the Bernam valley, the comparative evidence from South Indian megalithic cultures, and the broader trade network confirmed by the Oc-Eo and Virampatnam discoveries (p. 183). He frames this as a call to action: the Malayan governments owe a duty to the world of science to organise and finance systematic archaeological research, and the proto-historic period is every bit as worthy of investigation as the pre-historic (pp. 167, 175).
Context
- The article draws on the collections of Raffles Museum, Singapore (preserved by Japanese authorities during the occupation), the Perak Museum at Taiping, and the Australian Museum, Sydney, as well as unpublished correspondence from Dato Douglas, V. B. C. Baker, and M. W. F. Tweedie.
- Historiographically, the piece positions itself as a corrective to the “Greater India” school’s tendency to treat the Peninsula as a passive recipient of Indian civilisation, and as a methodological challenge to the etymological identification of toponyms that had become “stereotyped by continual repetition” (pp. 163, 166). It also engages directly with the recent synthesis of Georges Coedes, accepting much of it while adding navigational and geographical corrections.