Ancient India

There is every reason to believe that class society emerged here, in the traditionally most developed areas of the south of the Indochina Peninsula, a little earlier. All these areas were closely connected, ethnic differences within the southern plain of the Austro-Asiatic world were still weak.

The largest state-the Empire Bapnom (Funan) -existed in the 1st-6th centuries, uniting during the heyday of almost the whole of the Mongolian and Khmer plain of Southern Indochina. To the north, in the middle reaches of Irrawaddy, Tiao-Praia and Mekong, there were also land of monks and Khmers engaged in rice growing, but lived in smaller valleys and gravitated toward developed southern regions. The ancient India ...

In the west, within the monastic cultural environment, there were two early class societies of the Tibetan-Burmese language family: the state of Tarekkitara (Shrik-shetra) in the middle Irrawaddy and Weishali on the Arakan coast. In the north of the Indochina Peninsula were Thai princedoms, part of the ethnically diverse state of Dali, whose center was north, near Lake Daly.

From the Indo-Dravidian tradition, the system of varnas and many other similar institutions and concepts were not accepted here, and the perceived religions underwent significant changes and selection, adapted to create a class modification of the traditional cult of ancestors-the cult of the deified monarch's ancestor. The Mon-Khmers have developed a form of syncretic beliefs, like the cult of the god-king (deva-raja or buddha-raja).

The struggle against the Chinese empires, which began on the shores of the South Sea, dragged on for centuries and ended for the Western states of the coastal zone by the restoration of their independence in the sixth century, when the Vietnamese Vansuan empire appeared in the territory of modern North Vietnam (542-603). In more eastern Vietnamese states, their assimilation by the Chinese gradually increased, the victory of which can be said after the 10th century. The West-Chinese state of Dali (the Chinese called it Nanzhao) after the collapse of the Han empire restored its independence. Dali, Tarekkitar and a number of mountain monsters. States of the center of the Indochina Peninsula form a group of continental states of South-East Asia.

Ancient Thai and Vietnamese preserved their social structure, based on rural communities, their own spiritual life, in the development of which a significant role was played by the penetrating Indochina from Southern Hindustan in the second century. Buddhism.

Ancient India