“TheForgottenKingdomofArakan”History
Ancient geography and recent archaeology:
Dhanyawadi, Vesali and Mrauk-u.
Bob Hudson
ArchaeologyDepartment,UniversityofSydney, Australia.
“TheForgottenKingdomofArakan”History Workshop.
Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, November 2005.
Recent archaeological excavations and surveys at the old Arakanese sites of Dhanyawadi, Vesali and Mrauk-u raise new issues about each. It appears that Dhanyawadi is not the eccentric shape portrayed in early archaeological plans, but an oval site with some notable similarities to the walled Pyu sites of Upper Myanmar. Vesali shares one of these characteristics, an inward- curving brick gate. A radiocarbon date, the first for Vesali, intriguingly places another city gate in the 13th century AD. A review of the huge earth banks that surround Mrauk-u suggests that the popular notion that these were defensive may be a romanticised interpretation of what was essentially a water management system.
Location.
The early polities of Arakan were located in the valleys of the Kaladan and Lemro Rivers. While some traditional accounts locate early settlements, “royal capitals”, as far north as the Kyaukpandaung plateau (Tun Shwe Khine 1992: 20-21) the available evidence points to the alluvial lowlands. Satellite imagery (Figure 1) shows how restricted the area available for irrigated rice agriculture was. The old settlements occupy a strip of land that is only between 15 and 35 kilometres wide, and perhaps 60 kilometres from north to south. To the north, west and east are hills, and to the south the combined deltas of the two rivers meet the sea.
