Extract

Known as Chrysē, ‘the Golden Land’ to Pomponius Mela (3. 70) and Pliny (HN 6. 54, 80). The Peripl. M. Rubr. (63. 20) refers to it as a place for regular trade on the edge of the inhabited world, but only a few coins, glass, seals, and bronzes from the Roman world are known. To the finds from Oc-éo in southern Vietnam, and the bronze lamp from Pong Tuk in Thailand, can be added a coin of the usurper *Victorinus found near U-Thong in western Thailand.

Direct contact between *India and south-east Asia is shown by the appearance of iron in the mid-1st millennium bce as seen at Ban Don Ta Phet in western Thailand and the Sa-Huynh culture of Vietnam. Imports from India include glass, semi-precious stone beads, carnelian lion pendants as found in early Buddhist reliquaries, and ‘etched’ beads. Bronzes, with scenes of people, houses, horses, cattle, and buffaloes, resemble those on the Kulu vase from Gundla, India, and knob-base vessels are paralleled by one in an early Buddhist reliquary at Taxila.