After careful re-reading and analysis of original Old Burmese and other primary sources, the author discovered that four out of the five events considered to be the most important in the history of early Burma, and believed to have been historically accurate, are actually late-nineteenth and twentieth-century inventions of colonial historians caught in their own intellectual and political world. Only one of these is a genuine indigenous Burmese myth, but it too has been embellished by modern historians. The author discusses each of these five myths and concludes with an assessment of...
After careful re-reading and analysis of original Old Burmese and other primary sources, the author discovered that four out of the five events consid...
When the great kingdom of Pagan declined politically in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, its territory devolved into three centers of power and a period of transition occurred. Then two new kingdoms arose: the First Ava Dynasty in Upper Myanmar and the First Pegu Dynasty in Lower Myanmar. Both originated around the second half of the fourteenth century, reached their pinnacles in the fifteenth, and declined before the first half of the sixteenth century was over. Their story is the only missing piece in Myanmar's mainstream historiography, a gap this book is designed to...
When the great kingdom of Pagan declined politically in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, its territory devolved into three cente...