Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Suvarnabhumi
Summary
(सुवर्णभूमि; Pali: ) is a toponym, that appears in many ancient Indian literary sources and Buddhist texts such as the Mahavamsa, some stories of the Jataka tales, the Milinda Panha and the Ramayana.
Though its exact location is unknown and remains a matter of debate, Suvarṇabhūmi was an important port along trade routes that run through the Indian Ocean, setting sail from the wealthy ports in Basra, Ubullah and Siraf, through Muscat, Malabar, Ceylon, the Nicobars, Kedah and on through the Strait of Malacca to fabled Suvarṇabhūmi.
Ian Glover, Emeritus Reader in Southeast Asian Archaeology at the University of London, has said: "It is widely accepted in the 21st century that Suvarnabhumi as reported in early Indian literature was not a specific location which can be marked on a map. Rather, it was an idealised place, perhaps equivalent to Atlantis in Western history, a distant somewhere to the east of India where traders, sailors, and Buddhist and Hindu teachers went to make their fortunes and spread their teachings and bring back gold and other exotic products desired by a rising elite and the wealthy classes at home."
means 'golden land' or 'land of gold' and the ancient sources have associated it with one of a variety of places throughout the Southeast Asian region.
It might also be the source of the Western concept of Aurea Regio in Claudius Ptolemy's Trans-Gangetic India or India beyond the Ganges and the Golden Chersonese of the Greek and Roman geographers and sailors. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea refers to the Land of Gold, Chryse, and describes it as "an island in the ocean, the furthest extremity towards the east of the inhabited world, lying under the rising sun itself, called Chryse... Beyond this country... there lies a very great inland city called Thina". Dionysius Periegetes mentioned: "The island of Chryse (Gold), situated at the very rising of the Sun".
Or, as Priscian put it in his popular rendition of Periegetes: “if your ship... takes you to where the rising sun returns its warm light, then will be seen the Isle of Gold with its fertile soil.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.