Dvaravati is the conventional name for a network of early historic polities in present-day central Thailand, dated from about the 6th to the 11th century; archaeological evidence places the beginnings of its culture several centuries earlier, in a phase usually called Proto-Dvaravati. What Dvāravatī actually was is still not clear. Scholars have described it as a kingdom, a group of regional polities, a chiefdom, a changing mandala of political power, a collection of smaller peer polities, or even more generally as a shared artistic and religious tradition instead of one political state. These different interpretations are partly because the archaeological evidence is uneven, especially for ordinary settlements and reliably dated evidence, and partly because art historians and archaeologists approach the evidence in different ways. As a result, the political organization, chronology, territory, and extent of cultural unity are still debated. The term covers a cultural and artistic sphere wider than any political entity, and a shared material culture does not by itself imply a single ethnic group.
Mid-7th-century Chinese Buddhist accounts place a kingdom called To-lo-po-ti west of Isanapura, east of Sri Ksetra and north of Pan Pan. To the north it bordered Jiā Luó Shě Fú (), identified with Canasapura in the upper Mun-Chi basin and with Si Thep in the Pa Sak basin. Embassies to the Chinese court are recorded in 583, Text: around 605–616, in 638, 640, 643, 647, and 649. Three are counted under that name: 638, 640 and 649.
Mon communities, perhaps including maritime traders, are thought to have carried the culture into the Chao Phraya valley by the early centuries CE. That followed the transitional Proto-Dvaravati phase associated with principalities such as Chin Lin and Tun Sun in the western plains and Tou Yuan to the east, a phase usually dated to the 1st to 5th centuries, though one account limits it to the 4th and 5th. Dvaravati's early political centre is disputed. Proposed centres include Ayojjhapura (Si Thep), Sambuka (Nakhon Pathom), and Avadhyapura (). By the mid-7th century, prominence appears to have shifted to Lavo's Lavapura, following the absorption of Tou Yuan in 647. Some place the shift in the 10th or 11th centuries, with the decline of Si Thep; others take Lavapura for a separate polity, later the Lavo Kingdom, inside the Dvaravati sphere.
Its decline probably had several overlapping causes. Proposed factors are the expansion of Angkor from the lower Mekong between the 11th and 13th centuries,Srisakara Vallipotama, "ละโว้ / Lavo" [Thai with English summary], Warasan Muang Boran – วารสารเมืองโบราณ (Muang Boran/Archaeology Journal) vol.1, no.3, April–June 1975, pp.42-65, 116. northward campaigns by Tambralinga under King Sujita in the mid-10th century, reported to have taken Lavo, and warfare associated with Angkor in the early 11th century that reached the Menam valley. Pagan incursions into central Thailand in the 11th and 12th centuries are also proposed. The eastern centres such as Lavo have been held to be lost by the 10th or 11th century, while the western principalities lasted into the early 12th century. The region then entered the Xiān period, marked by the emergence of Suphannabhum, Phrip Phri, and Ayodhya, with the latter taking control of Lavo by the 14th century.
Name
Coins and medallions
The name is known from coins inscribed in Sanskrit śrī dvāravatī, "that which has gates". They are small silver medallions found at Nakhon Pathom, Noen Hin, U Thong, and Sing Buri, with at least twenty-two further examples recorded. They bear śrī-dvāravatī-īśvara-puṇya, "merit of the glorious Lord of Dvāravatī". Their association with sanctuary foundations has led them to be regarded as ritual deposits rather than currency, making their distribution an indication of the reach of a ruler's merit rather than a monetary zone. -īśvara names in pre-Angkorian inscriptions have several meanings, denoting followers of Śiva, Viṣṇu, or more generally a lord or temporal ruler.
Finds are recorded from Nakhon Pathom, Ratchaburi, Suphan Buri, Sing Buri, Lop Buri and Chai Nat, but most lack secure provenance, many are privately held, and forgeries have been identified. Three of the medallions were excavated under controlled conditions, at monument 7 of Khok Chang Din in 1997, inside a jar holding uninscribed ritual coins and chopped silver ingots. Two others, in private Thai collections and of uncertain origin, read śrīdvāravatīśvaradevīpuṇya, the meritorious work of the queen of the lord of Dvāravatī. Revire reads puṇya on these pieces as Brahmanical rather than Buddhist Sanskrit, in the older ritual sense of a meritorious work, and takes the lord of Dvāravatī to have counted Hindu and Buddhist foundations alike as merit.
Inscriptions
The Wat Phra Ngam Inscription (N.Th. 21), found in 2019 in Nakhon Pathom and dated to the 6th century, names three cities: Śrīyānaṁdimiriṅga or Śrīyānaṁdimiriṅgapratipura, Hastināpurī and Dvāravatī. It has been taken to suggest that Nakhon Pathom was Dvāravatī's central place. The earliest reference to Dvaravati on stone is the Wat Chanthuek Inscription (N.M. 4; K.1009) from Pak Chong, Nakhon Ratchasima Province, in Sanskrit in the Pallava script, a south Indian type now more often called Late Southern Brahmi. The inscription records that a queen who was a daughter of the Lord of Dvaravati set up a stone image of the Tathāgata. The script has been dated to about 550–650.
What the stone says is read three ways. Skilling makes the queen and the daughter one person, where the first published translation made them two. Jacques read the same fragment as devī-[śr]īn and took the image to be the goddess Śrī rather than the Tathāgata, which changes what was installed and not only who installed it. Revire leaves the consequence for ritual practice open, and calls the inscription a 7th-century text. What it shows about Dvaravati's extent is disputed. John Guy takes it to carry the zone well into northeastern Thailand; Skilling argues that calling the donor the ruler's daughter places the site outside Dvaravati and marks a marriage alliance with a neighbouring realm.
Other occurrences
The name reached China in several forms, including Duheluobodi, Duoheluo, Duheluo, Duoluobodi and Tuhuoluo, where the place is described as a country (). The records place it between Śrīkṣetra in present-day Myanmar and Īśānapura in Cambodia. Xuanzang and Yijing give Duoluobodi, which Revire suggests may represent Dvārapati, "lord of Dvāra", rather than Dvāravatī. Dvāravatī has been tentatively linked to the polity Chinese sources call Lang-chia or Lang-ya-hsiu. The name also occurs in India. The Yādava kings of Devagiri used dvāravatīpuravarādhiśvara, "overlord of Dvāravatī the best of cities", and Bhillama II described himself as lord of the city of Dvāravatī and a descendant of Viṣṇu.
Dvāravatī is the city of Krishna in Indian tradition. Sukhothai inscriptions 2 and 11 call a city probably corresponding to Nakhon Pathom nakhon phra krit, "the city of Lord Krishna"; This has been regarded as supporting the identification. Si Thep was instead proposed in 2009, on its early Viṣṇu cult and two images of Kṛṣṇa Govardhanadhāra dated to about the late 6th and late 7th centuries.
The name was not confined to the central plain. The toponym is otherwise rare in Khmer epigraphy, appearing as a place name in an inscription of 952 and as a personal name in one of 1002. Two Cambodian donative inscriptions of the late 10th and early 11th centuries use it, but are doubted to refer to the polity in Thailand. Thandwe in Rakhine is equated with a classical Dvāravatī in early modern Burmese chronicles.
History
Dvaravati culture is marked by moated urban settlements coupled with religious architecture in brick, laterite or both. Major sites include Nakhon Pathom, U Thong in present-day Suphan Buri Province, Si Thep and Khu Bua, as well as and Si Mahosot.
The conventional chronology rests on Chinese texts and art-historical comparison. Excavations at Chan Sen and the Tha Muang mound at U Thong have unsettled it: newly dated Dvaravati material from U Thong may take the tradition's beginnings back to about 200 CE.Glover, I. (2011). The Dvaravati Gap-Linking Prehistory and History in Early Thailand. Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association, 30, 79-86. An earlier transitional phase is accepted on one reading but placed in the 4th and 5th centuries, the sculptural and epigraphic evidence being held undatable before the 6th and the main period running from the 7th to the 9th.
Proto-Dvaravati: 1st – 5th centuries
Definition and chronology
The phase is usually placed in the 1st to 5th centuries, though one account restricts it to the 4th and 5th. The label was proposed in 2008 and taken up on the argument that the sculpture, architecture and urban planning of Dvaravati are the end of a long process rather than its beginning. A period of local development must therefore precede them, since the older model of a wholesale arrival of Indian culture is no longer held. Proto-Dvaravati is preferred to late prehistory, which implies no development beyond Iron Age forms, and to early Dvaravati, which implies a culture already formed.
The interval between the two bodies of evidence has been named the "Pre-Dvāravatī Gap". Late prehistoric finds are rich in iron and finely worked hard-stone beads; Dvaravati collections hold little iron and poorer bead work but add brick religious architecture and moated enclosures. Whether this is a break in occupation or simply sites not yet found was left open. Radiocarbon dates on brick and plaster at Uthong have since taken occupation back to the 5th or perhaps the 4th century, on which the conventional range of about 600–1000 CE has been argued to move back some two centuries. Many sites occupied between about 500 BCE and 500 CE continued in use into the Dvaravati period, particularly in the western and northern Chao Phraya basin. How much of the later religious and expressive culture began in that earlier phase was left open.
A third reading parts from the proposal to redate the assemblage as a whole. On it the full range of Dvaravati pottery is not yet present in the earlier phase: kendi, a spouted water vessel, do not appear in central Thailand before the 6th century, and some prehistoric forms persist into the 4th and 5th. The same argument is applied to the polity. The embassy that reached the Tang court in 638 records the first recognition of Dvaravati rather than its beginning, since a polity had to be self-defining and wealthy enough to mount the journey.
Archaeological evidence