The Pyu city-states (Burmese: ပျူ မြို့ပြ နိုင်ငံများ [pjù mjo̼.pjɑ̼ nàɪɴŋàɴ mjá]) were a group of city-states that existed from about the 2nd century BCE to the mid-11th century in present-day Upper Myanmar. These city-states were founded as part of the migration of the Pyu people from Tibet to Mainland Southeast Asia by the Tibeto-Burman-speaking Pyu settlers, the earliest inhabitants of Burma of whom records are extant. The thousand-year period, often referred to as the Pyu millennium, linked the Bronze Age to the beginning of the classical states period when the Pagan Kingdom emerged in the late 9th century.
The major Pyu city-states were all located in the three main irrigated regions of Upper Burma: the Mu River Valley, the Kyaukse plains and Minbu region, around the confluence of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin Rivers. Five major walled cities- Beikthano, Maingmaw, Binnaka, Hanlin, and Sri Ksetra- and several smaller towns have been excavated throughout the Irrawaddy River basin. Halin, founded in the 1st century AD, was the largest and most important city until around the 7th or 8th century when it was superseded by Sri Ksetra (near modern Pyay) at the southern edge of the Pyu Realm. Twice as large as Halin, Sri Ksetra was eventually the largest and most influential Pyu centre. Only the city-states of Halin, Beikthano and Sri Ksetra are designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, where the other sites can be added in the future for an extension nomination.
The Pyu realm was part of an overland trade route between China and India. The Pyu culture was heavily influenced by trade with India, importing Buddhism as well as other cultural, architectural and political concepts, which would have an enduring influence on the political organisation and culture of Burma. The Pyu calendar, based on the Buddhist calendar, later became the Burmese calendar. The Pyu script, based on the Brahmi script, may have been the source of the Burmese script used to write the Burmese language.
The millennium-old civilisation came crashing down in the 9th century when the city-states were destroyed by repeated invasions from the Kingdom of Nanzhao. The Bamar people set up a garrison town at Bagan (Pagan) at the confluence of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin Rivers. Pyu settlements remained in Upper Burma for the next three centuries but the Pyu gradually were absorbed into the expanding Pagan Kingdom. The Pyu language still existed until the late 12th century. By the 13th century, the Pyu had assumed the Burman ethnicity. The histories and legends of the Pyu were also incorporated into those of the Bamar.
Background
Based on limited archaeological evidence, it is inferred that the earliest cultures existed in Burma as early as 11,000 BCE, mainly in the central dry zone close to the Irrawaddy. The Anyathian, Burma's Stone Age, existed around the same time as the Lower Paleolithic and Middle Paleolithic eras in Europe. Three caves located near Taunggyi at the foothills of the Shan Hills have yielded Neolithic artefacts dated to 10,000–6000 BCE.
About 1500 BCE, people in the region were turning copper into bronze, growing rice, and domesticating chickens and pigs. By 500 BCE, iron-working settlements emerged in an area south of present-day Mandalay. Bronze-decorated coffins and burial sites filled with earthenware remains have been excavated. Archaeological evidence at Samon River Valley south of Mandalay suggests rice-growing settlements that traded with China between 500 BCE and 200 CE.
In about the 2nd century BCE, the Tibeto-Burman-speaking Pyu people began to enter the Irrawaddy River Valley from present-day Yunnan using the Taping and Shweli Rivers. The original home of the Pyu is reconstructed to be Qinghai Lake, which is located in the present-day provinces of Qinghai and Gansu. The Pyu, the earliest inhabitants of Burma of whom records are extant, went on to found settlements throughout the plains region centred on the confluence of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin Rivers that has been inhabited since the Paleolithic. The Pyu realm was longer than wide, stretching from Sri Ksetra in the south to Halin in the north, Binnaka and Maingmaw to the east and probably Ayadawkye to the west. The Tang dynasty's records report 18 Pyu states, nine of which were walled cities, covering 298 districts.
Archaeology
The Pyu people were the earliest people in Southeast Asia to welcome in and adapt Brahmic scripts in order to record their tonal language, inventing tonal markers. Major inscriptions on stone in the Pyu language survive at Sri Ksetra, Hanlin and near Pinle (Maingmaw), and Bagan. The earliest evidence of Pyu writing dates to the third-fourth and fifth-sixth centuries CE.
The Pyu shared a type of urbanism on a wide variety of scales. They had walled spaces with one side sealed by a water tank or a tank outside of the walls. By late prehistory, the Pyu had settled for quite some time in Beikthano in the Yin River Valley and the Nawin River Valley at Sri Ksetra, proving their skills of water control using irrigation systems depending on good knowledge of the conditions in each locality and area. Sri Ksetra contained fields, irrigation canals, water tanks and iron-working sites, as well as monuments, markets and habitation areas both inside and outside the walls, retaining aspects of a cluster of villages.
At both Sri Ksetra and Beikthano, funerary halls with brick walls and wooden pillars containing cremated urn burials have been excavated, providing evidence of a powerful belief system in the elaborate provision of the dead. An aspect of funerary culture at Sri Ksetra not found so far at other Pyu sites are burial terraces, of which there were at least nine major ones outside the southern city walls, each containing hundreds or occasionally thousands of cremation burial urns.
Archaeological surveys have actually so far unearthed 12 walled cities, including five large walled cities, and several smaller non-fortified settlements, located at or near the three most important irrigated regions of precolonial Burma: the Mu River Valley in the north, the Kyaukse plains in centre, and the Minbu region in the south and west of the former two. The city-states were contemporaries of the Kingdom of Funan (Cambodia) and (perhaps) Champa (southern Vietnam), Dvaravati (Thailand), Tambralinga and Takuapa near the Kra Isthmus, and Srivijaya (southeast Sumatra). All these statelets foreshadowed the rise of the "classical kingdoms" of Southeast Asia in the second millennium CE.
Decline of Pyu city-states
It was a long-lasting civilisation that lasted nearly a millennium to the early 9th century until a new group of "swift horsemen" from the north, the (Mranma) (Burmans) of the Nanzhao Kingdom entered the upper Irrawaddy valley through a series of raids. According to the Tang Dynasty chronicles, the Nanzhao began their raids of Upper Burma starting as early as 754 or 760. By 763, the Nanzhao king Ko-lo-feng had conquered the upper Irrawaddy Valley. Nanzhao raids intensified in the 9th century, with the Nanzhao raiding in 800–802, and again in 808–809. Finally, according to the Chinese, in 832, the Nanzhao warriors overran the Pyu country, and took away 3000 Pyu prisoners from Halin. (In 835, the Chinese records say the Nanzhao also raided a state, generally identified by some but not universally accepted to be a Pyu state.)
To be sure, the Pyu and their culture did not disappear just because 3000 of them were taken away. The size of the Pyu realm and its many walled cities throughout the land indicates a population many times over. Indeed, no firm indications at Sri Ksetra or at any other Pyu site exist to suggest a violent overthrow. It is more likely that these raids significantly weakened the Pyu states, enabling the Burmans to move into Pyu territories. At any rate, evidence shows that the actual pace of Burman migration into the Pyu realm was gradual. Radiocarbon dating shows that human activity existed until c. 870 at Halin, the subject of the 832 Nanzhao raid. The Burmese chronicles claim the Burmans founded the fortified city of Pagan (Bagan) in 849 but the oldest radiocarbon dated evidence at Pagan (old walls) points to 980 CE while the main walls point to circa 1020 CE, just 24 years earlier than the beginning of the reign of Anawrahta, the founder of Pagan Empire.
At any rate, the Burmans had overtaken the leadership of the Pyu realm by the late 10th century, and went on to found the Pagan Empire in the middle of the 11th century, unifying the Irrawaddy valley and its periphery for the first time. Nonetheless, the Pyu had left an indelible mark on Pagan whose Burman rulers would incorporate the histories and legends of the Pyu as their own. The Burman kings of Pagan claimed descent from the kings of Sri Ksetra and Tagaung as far back as 850 BCE—a claim dismissed by most modern scholars. Pyu settlements remained in Upper Burma for the next three centuries but the Pyu gradually were absorbed and assimilated into the expanding Pagan Empire. The Pyu language still existed until the late 12th century but by the 13th century, the Pyu had assumed the Burman ethnicity and disappeared into history.
City-states
Of the 12 walled cities excavated thus far, five are the remains of largest Pyu states: Beikthano, Maingmaw, Binnaka, Halin and Sri Ksetra.
Beikthano
Beikthano (Burmese: ဗိဿနိုး [beɪʔθənó]) situated in the irrigated Minbu region (near present-day Taungdwingyi) with direct land access to the well-watered Kyaukse plains to its northeast, is the oldest urban site so far discovered and scientifically excavated site. Its remains—the structures, pottery, artefacts, and human skeletons—date from 200 BCE to 100 CE. Named after the Hindu god Vishnu, the city may be the first capital of a culturally and perhaps even politically uniform state in the history of Burma. It was a large fortified settlement, measuring approximately 300 hectares inside the rectangular (3 km × 1 km (1.86 mi × 0.62 mi)) walls. The walls and fortifications along it measured 6 metres (20 ft) thick, and are radiocarbon dated to a period between 180 BCE and 610 CE. Like most subsequent cities, the main entrance of the walls led to the palace, which faced east. Stupas and monastic buildings have also been excavated within the city walls.
Maingmaw
Maingmaw (မိုင်းမော [máɪɰ̃ mɔ́]), also called Mong Mao (not to be confused with Mong Mao), located in the Kyaukse region, was circular in shape, and has tentatively been dated to the first millennium BCE. It is also sometimes called Pinle after the village near its modern site in Myittha Township and should not be confused with Pinle Pyu, a speculated Pyu city in Southern Myanmar. At 2.5 km (1.6 mi) in diameter and 222 hectares, Maingmaw is one of the largest ancient cities on the entire Kyaukse plains. It has two inner enclosure walls, the outer of which is square while the inner one is circular. The plan of a circle within a square suggest a zodiac sign which represents a view of the heavens from the perspective of the sun, the manner in which 19th century Mandalay was also conceptualised. At almost dead centre, a 19th-century temple called Nandawya Paya, which was probably built upon the ruins of an ancient one. The city is bisected by a canal, thought to be contemporary to the city, though no scientific dating has confirmed it. Excavations—the first of which was carried out in 1979—have unearthed many artefacts, including jewellery, silver coins, and funerary urns. Many of the artefacts such as the coins and funerary urns are virtually identical to those found in Beikthano and Binnaka.
Binnaka
Binnaka (ဘိန္နက [bèɪɰ̃nəka̰]) too was located in the Kyaukse region, and virtually identical to its neighbour Maingmaw in numerous ways. Its brick structures shared the same floor plan as those found at Beikthano and other Pyu sites. Excavations have recovered pre-Buddhist artefacts, gold necklaces, precious stone images of elephants, turtles and lions, distinctive Pyu pottery, terracotta tablets with writing that strongly resembled the Pyu script, and various kinds of acid-etched onyx beads along with others made of amber and jade. Also excavated are distinctive silver coins identical to those found at Beikthano and Binnaka, stone moulds for casting silver and gold ornamental flowers, a gold armlet in association with a silver bowl that has Pyu writing on it, and funerary urns virtually identical to those found Beikthano and Binnaka.
Both Maingmaw and Binnaka may have been contemporary of Beikthano. The chronicles, which do not mention Beikthano at all, do mention the two, though not specifically as Pyu cities. The chronicles state that the ruler of Binnaka was responsible for the fall of Tagaung, the city identified by the chronicles as the original home of Burmese speakers. Binnaka was inhabited until about the 19th century, according to a Konbaung era palm-leaf sittan (record) discovered there.>
Halin
Halin or Halingyi (ဟန်လင်းကြီး [həlɪ́ɰ̃dʑí]), located in the Mu valley, one of the largest irrigated regions of precolonial Burma, is the northernmost Pyu city so far discovered. The earliest artefacts of Halin—city's wooden gates—are radiocarbon dated to 70 CE. The city was rectangular but with curved corners, and brick-walled. Excavated walls are approximately 3.2 km (2.0 mi) long on the north–south axis and 1.6 km (0.99 mi) on the east–west. At 664 hectares, the city was nearly twice the size of Beikthano. It has four main gates at the cardinal points, and a total of 12 gates, based on the zodiac. A river or canal ran through the city. Traces of a moat exist on all sides except the south, where it was probably not needed, as land was dammed there to create reservoirs.