Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 410

FURTHER-INDIAN
BRANCH
409 The Khmers were pushed further east and, as has been said, became the progenitors of the Cambodians, while the Mons remained behind. In A.D. 573, the latter founded Hanthawady or Pegu, and many centuries later they came to be known to the early merchant adventurers as Peguans. Suddhammapura or Thaton, then a seaport, had been for many centuries their chief town. While the Burmans, then in the north, were at warfare with the Shans (see below) and the Chinese, the Mons were busy with trade and amassing riches; tales of the magnificence of Pegu attracted more and more merchant adventurers. Nowadays, the Mons are racially undistinguishable from the Burmans, but their language is still spoken by some 225,000 people, principally in Amherst and Thaton; they use also the Burmese characters.
The Mons claim to have been visited by Buddhist missionaries as far back as the time of Asoka (middle of the third century B.c.; see p. 339f.). In the first millennium A.D., Thaton was an important seat of Buddhist culture; there were many learned men, well versed in the Tripitaka and also in Vedic literature. Unfortunately, there are no extant written documents of this first and most important period of Mon history. The earliest Mon inscriptions belong to the late eleventh and the early twelfth centuries A.D. During this second period of their history, which began in the middle of the eleventh century, the Mons were annexed by the Burmese kingdom of Pagan, but in the thirteenth century they freed themselves and founded the so-called "medieval" kingdom, which was centred in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at Pegu. In 1540 the Mons definitely lost their political independence to the Burmans. The majority of the Mon inscriptions belong to the Mon "medieval" kingdom.
The decipherment of the ancient Mon inscriptions is mainly the work of Professor C. O. Blagden; the two stone pillars, known as the Myazedi inscriptions, found near the Myazedi pagoda (Myinkaba, Pagan), and belonging to the beginning of the twelth century A.D., are the "Rosetta stones" of the Mon and Pyu (see below) languages. The better preserved pillar, discovered in 1886-7, contains the same document in four languages, one on each face, Pali, Burmese, Mon and Pyu.
It is now generally accepted that the Mons borrowed their script from South India. Indeed, the shapes of the letters of the early Mon character are nearly identical with those of the early inscriptions of Champa and Java, and are probably connected with the Grantha alphabet of the Pallavas of Kanchi in the east of South India. In adapting the South Indian character to their speech, the Mons discarded some of the Indian letters, as they had no use for them; some others were used only in words of Indian origin. At the same time, the Mons added two signs, both labial letters; one, a new invention, for a b deprived of sonority, somewhat between b and p, the other, a modification of the Indian combination of mb. Fig. 154, col. 28.
As the French scholar Duroiselle rightly points out, in the early stage the Mon letters, though already showing a tendency to become circles, or parts of circles, were still very distinctive and included some complex and beautiful forms, while in the "medieval" period the tendency was towards less distinctiveness, certain of the letters and combinations of