Mon kingdoms

Mon kingdoms were political establishments by the Mon-speaking people that ruled large sections of present-day Burma (Myanmar) at various times in the last 1200 years. The kingdoms in chronological order are the Thaton Kingdom (9th century–1057), the Hanthawaddy Kingdom (1287–1539), and the Restored Hanthawaddy Kingdom (1740–1757).

The first recorded kingdom attributed to the Mon people is Dvaravati, which prospered until around 1000 CE when their capital was sacked by the Khmer Empire and a significant portion of the inhabitants fled west to present-day Lower Burma and eventually founded new polities.

Mainstream scholarship holds that the Mon established small polities (or large city-states) in Lower Burma. Both the city of Thaton and Pegu (Bago) are believed to have been established in the 9th century. The states were important trading ports between Indian Ocean and mainland Southeast Asia. Still, according to traditional reconstruction, the early Mon city-states were conquered by the Pagan Kingdom from the north in 1057, and that Thaton's literary and religious traditions helped to mould early Pagan civilisation. Between 1050 and about 1085, Mon craftsmen and artisans helped to build some two thousand monuments at Pagan, the remains of which today rival the splendors of Angkor Wat. The Mon script is considered to be the source of the Burmese script, the earliest evidence of which was dated to 1058, a year after the Thaton conquest, by the colonial era scholarship.

However, recent research—still a minority view—argues that Mon influence on the interior after Anawrahta's conquest is a greatly exaggerated post-Pagan legend, and that Lower Burma in fact lacked a substantial independent polity prior to Pagan's expansion. Possibly in this period, the delta sedimentation—which now extends the coastline by three miles (4.8 kilometres)a century—remained insufficient, and the sea still reached too far inland, to support a population even as large as the modest population of the late precolonial era. (The earliest evidence of Burmese script is dated to 1035, and possibly as early as 984 CE. Recent research argues that the Pyu script was the source of the Burmese script.)

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