The Pyu

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In the dry heart of central Myanmar, where the Irrawaddy — properly the Ayeyarwady — bends through a rain-starved plain that the monsoon largely passes over, the land carries the outlines of cities older than any other in mainland Southeast Asia. They are visible mostly from the air: enormous brick rings and rectangles laid into the fields, traced by walls now reduced to low ridges, moats silted into shallow depressions, and here and there a cylindrical brick tower still standing forty meters above the paddy. These are the works of the Pyu, who built the first urban civilization of the Irrawaddy basin and who were, on the testimony of their own gold and stone, the people through whom the teaching of the Buddha first took root in the soil of Myanmar.

The Pyu called themselves Tircul (also rendered Tirchul); the Chinese, whose dynastic histories preserve some of the fullest external accounts of them, wrote their name as Piao. They were speakers of a Tibeto-Burman tongue, a branch of the vast Sino-Tibetan family, and the linguistic evidence places their southward movement out of the eastern Himalayan margins into the Irrawaddy valley somewhere around the turn of the Common Era. From roughly the second century BCE to the ninth century CE — better than a thousand years — their walled settlements held the central plain, an arc of city-states bound by a shared script, a shared mortuary practice, and a shared religion, yet never, so far as the record shows, by a single crown.

The three cities

Three of their cities dominate the record, and in 2014 the remains of all three together became the first property in Myanmar inscribed on the World Heritage List, recognized as the earliest surviving testimony to the arrival of Buddhism in Southeast Asia. They lie strung along the central Dry Zone of the Irrawaddy and its tributary valleys — the Mu, the Yin, the Nawin — in landscapes that the Pyu made habitable by an intensive command of water.

Beikthano is the oldest, with occupation reaching back to the centuries around the start of the Common Era and a fortified urban life flourishing from roughly the first through the fifth century CE. Its modern Burmese name means the city of Vishnu — Beikthano being the local form of the god’s name — and although the name has fed speculation about a Hindu founding, the excavated site is overwhelmingly that of an early Buddhist center, not a Vaishnava one. Its plan is broadly rectangular. The Burmese archaeologist Aung Thaw, who excavated it between 1959 and 1968, uncovered there a feature that would prove central to understanding the whole civilization: a large hall to the south of the citadel-palace, designated KKG9, in and around which lay some forty terracotta funerary urns. Across the site more than seven hundred such urns came to light, with dozens of intact lids — the residue of a population that cremated its dead and stored the ashes in jars, the urns themselves graded by size and grouping in a way that registers the contours of a stratified society. The plan of one of Beikthano’s monastic buildings answers so closely to that of a monastery at Nagarjunakonda, the great Buddhist site of the Krishna valley in southern India, that the resemblance has been read as a direct architectural borrowing — a thread tying the Irrawaddy to the Buddhist heartland of the Deccan.

Halin (Hanlin), in the far north of the Pyu world near the headwaters of the Mu, was a city of salt. Its wells tapped brine in a region where salt was among the most valuable commodities of the first millennium, and the wealth it drew underwrote a settlement whose roots, on the most recent radiocarbon work, run astonishingly deep — a stratified sequence at Halin extends from the early third millennium BCE, which would make it among the oldest known village sites in all of mainland Southeast Asia, down into the early second millennium CE. From Halin come the earliest specimens of Pyu writing yet found, the first script of Myanmar. It is also Halin that the Chinese records name as the city the Nanzhao armies overran in 832, carrying off three thousand of its people — though even there the carbon dates of human activity run on toward 870, four decades past the recorded sack, a reminder that the fall of a city is rarely the clean event a chronicle makes it.

Sri Ksetra — Thayekhittaya in Burmese, the field of splendor — was the greatest of the three and, from the fifth century into the early ninth, the most influential center the Pyu raised. Its form is the signature of Pyu urbanism: a vast circle, more than thirteen kilometers in circumference and three to four across, enclosing on the order of fourteen hundred hectares — a footprint larger than that of the later capital at Bagan or of nineteenth-century Mandalay. Brick walls some four and a half meters high were pierced by twelve gates, each said to have been guarded by a deva, with a pagoda standing at each of the four cardinal quarters. Within the circle sat the rectangular palace citadel, the seat of the ruling line, while the great religious monuments rose mostly outside the walls. Among them the Bawbawgyi stupa still stands — a tall cylindrical brick mass on a stepped base, climbing to roughly forty-six and a half meters, dated to about the sixth or seventh century — together with the Payagyi and Payama mounds and the small vaulted brick shrines, the Bebe and the Lemyethna, whose hollow interiors prefigure the temple architecture of Bagan. The circular plan, the brick monumentality, and the deliberate fusion of indigenous layout with imported Indic design make Sri Ksetra the fullest expression of what the Pyu built.

The shape of the cities

What unites the three is not a style but a system. The Pyu city was an irrigated city, set down in a zone too dry to farm without engineering, and it survived by controlling water: tanks, canals, brick-lined channels, and reservoirs feeding the rice that fed the walls. Some of these works are still in use. The enclosures themselves mix two grammars — the circular and the rectangular, the local and the Indic — and they were built almost entirely of fired brick, the material in which the Pyu were masters before any other people of the region. Inside ran the apparatus of a complex society: palace citadels, workshops for iron and for the ceramic that the urn-burials consumed in quantity, monasteries, stupas, cemeteries, and the gates with their guardian figures.

This was a civilization of the Iron Age maturing into the city. The deeper archaeological sequences at Sri Ksetra and Beikthano trace an unbroken passage from late prehistoric iron-working and ancestor-burial communities into proto-urban and then fully urban forms by the middle of the first millennium CE — a local trajectory, not an import dropped from outside, even as Indian ideas and Indian craft poured in along the trade routes. The Pyu shared this pattern of emerging complexity with their neighbors across the mainland, the Mon and Dvaravati polities to the southeast, the pre-Angkorian Khmer, the coastal kingdoms — but their radiocarbon chronologies presently run earlier than most, which is why their cities carry the weight of being called the first.

The coming of the Dharma

The religion of the Pyu is legible above all in what they wrote and what they buried. They adapted, for their own Tibeto-Burman speech, a Brahmi-derived script drawn from the writing systems of both northern and southern India — the Pyu script proper, which took recognizable shape between roughly the second and sixth centuries CE and which scholarship now suspects may itself be the ancestor of the Burmese alphabet. But they did not write in Pyu alone. Their inscriptions are trilingual in their reach: the vernacular Pyu predominates, yet the two great cosmopolitan tongues of Buddhist and Indic learning, Sanskrit and Pali, stand beside it, sometimes interlinear with the Pyu, sometimes alone. Only from the seventh and eighth centuries do Sri Ksetra’s inscriptions appear in Pyu unaccompanied — the mark of a script grown confident in its own right.

The single most eloquent witness is the find from the Khin Ba mound at Sri Ksetra: a set of twenty leaves of gold, bound and inscribed in Pali in a Pyu-style script with southern Indian features, datable to about the middle of the fifth century, carrying excerpts from the Buddhist canon — passages associated with the Abhidhamma, the systematic-philosophy division of the Tripitaka. These are among the oldest Pali texts surviving anywhere, an early-fifth-century material proof that the canonical teaching had reached and was being copied in the Irrawaddy valley centuries before the rise of the kingdom that would make Theravada the religion of all Myanmar. The mortuary record carries the same message from below: the mass of cremation urns at Beikthano, ash committed to jars rather than to grand individual tombs, registers a population that had taken the Buddhist way of death deep into ordinary life. The adoption was not only royal and elite; it was popular.

The Pyu Buddhism that the evidence reveals was, however, not the single-stranded Theravada of later centuries. Alongside the dominant Theravada current run unmistakable signs of Mahayana and other schools — votive plaques and bronzes of bodhisattvas, motifs whose architectural and iconographic ancestry points to eastern India and the Mahayana centers there, mingling with forms tied to the south and to Sri Lanka. And Hindu deities, Vishnu most often, appear in stone among the predominantly Buddhist remains, evidence that Vaishnava devotion had a place in the Pyu cities even as Buddhism set their dominant tone. It was a layered, absorptive religious world — the monastic institution, the relic-bearing stupa, the doctrine of moral consequence carried by act, karma, and the expectation of the future Buddha Maitreya all attested in the same archaeological horizon as Hindu image and indigenous spirit. The Pyu did not so much choose among these as house them together.

The court at the edge of Tang

For a brief, vivid moment the Pyu step out of archaeology and into the written history of their largest neighbor. At the turn of the ninth century the court of Sri Ksetra opened formal relations with Tang China, then the dominant power of eastern Asia, and the Chinese sources record an embassy of 800–802 that has left an unusually warm trace. A Pyu prince led a delegation to the imperial capital at Chang’an, and with him came a troupe of court performers — some thirty-five musicians and dancers — whose performance made a deep impression on the Tang capital. The poet Bai Juyi, one of the supreme literary voices of the age, wrote of the Pyu orchestra, fixing the exotic music of the distant southern kingdom in Chinese verse. It is a rare thing: a vanished civilization preserved not only in its own ruins but in the admiring poetry of a foreign court that heard its music played live.

What that embassy implies — a centralized court wealthy enough to mount such a mission, sophisticated enough to be received with honor at the most cultivated capital in the world — is borne out by the Pyu economy. They struck silver coins, among the earliest minted in Southeast Asia, bearing the srivatsa, the auspicious knot-symbol of fortune, and the rising-sun emblem; these coins circulated widely beyond the Pyu world, and their dies link the Irrawaddy cities into a first-millennium monetary network that ran across the mainland and down toward the coast. The Pyu were not isolated. They sat astride the overland routes between India and China and the riverine routes to the sea, and their wealth, their script, and their religion all came of that position.

The silence after

The ninth century closed the Pyu age. The expanding kingdom of Nanzhao, a power of the highlands to the northeast in what is now Yunnan, pressed down repeatedly on the Pyu cities — the campaign that the Chinese annals place in 832, with the carrying-off of three thousand from Halin, is the sharpest of these blows, with further devastation recorded in the years that followed. The cities did not vanish on the day of a raid; carbon dates show life persisting at Halin for decades after its reported sack, and Pyu population, language, and Buddhist practice did not simply evaporate. But the urban order weakened, and over the following generations the Pyu were absorbed into the rising Burman-speaking population gathering upriver, who would in time build their own kingdom and make of the Theravada the Pyu had carried a state religion.

What the Pyu left is not a successor crown but a record written into the ground. The circle of Sri Ksetra still holds its twelve broken gates; the Bawbawgyi still rises cylindrical and unmistakable over the fields; under the soil of Beikthano lie the seven hundred urns of a people who burned their dead and trusted them to the Buddha; and in a reliquary at Sri Ksetra survive twenty gold leaves on which, in the fifth century, someone inscribed the words of the canon in Pali. Read together, these are the documentary witness — material, dated, and unambiguous — of the first cities of Myanmar, and of the moment the Dharma became a thing built in brick on the banks of the Irrawaddy.

Scholarship and the textual record

The Pyu are a discipline reconstructed almost entirely from epigraphy and the spade, since they left no continuous narrative literature of their own; the modern study of them rests on the decipherment of their script and the stratigraphy of their cities.

• The foundational act of decipherment was Charles Otto Blagden’s work in the early 1910s on the Pyu portion of the quadrilingual Myazedi inscription (a stele of the early twelfth century, written in Pyu, Pali, Mon, and Old Burmese), which functioned as the Rosetta key for the language; Blagden was the first to recognize Pyu as an independent branch of Sino-Tibetan.
• The authoritative modern corpus is Arlo Griffiths, Bob Hudson, Marc Miyake, and Julian Wheatley, “Studies in Pyu Epigraphy, I: state of the field, edition and analysis of the Kan Wet Khaung Gon inscription, and inventory of the corpus,” Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 103 (2017): 43–205, available open-access (shs.hal.science/halshs-01788647); it surveys the surviving Pyu, Sanskrit, and Pali inscriptions and establishes the editorial methodology for the field.
• On the archaeology of urban origins, Janice Stargardt’s excavations are reported in “Early urban archaeology in Southeast Asia: the first evidence for a Pyu habitation site at Sri Ksetra, Myanmar” (antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/stargardt348), building on her monograph The Ancient Pyu of Burma (PACSEA, 1990); the radiocarbon-anchored transition from Iron Age to city is treated in Bob Hudson and Terry Lustig’s and related work published in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.
• The classic excavation report remains Aung Thaw, Report on the Excavations at Beikthano (Rangoon: Ministry of Union Culture, 1968), the source for the terracotta urn-burials and the Nagarjunakonda monastery parallel.
• For the Buddhist canonical texts whose Pali the Pyu were already copying in gold in the fifth century, the foundational English scholarly anthology is Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translations (Harvard Oriental Series, 1896), held in the library here.

See also

Buddhism · Buddha · Mahayana · Tripitaka · Maitreya · karma · monasticism · Hinduism · China · the Iron Age · Champa · Majapahit

→ In the library: Warren — Buddhism in Translations (1896)

→ Related: Buddhism · Buddha · Hinduism · China · Iron Age · Champa · Majapahit · Mahayana · Tripitaka · Monasticism · Karma · Maitreya