Early History of Burma

The early history of Burma is obscure. The Burmese chronicles begin with the supposed foundation of Tagaung in 850 B.C., but the stories they tell are copies of Indian legends taken from Sanskrit or Pali originals.

The earliest extant description of Further India is in the Geography of the Alexandrian scholar, Ptolemy, who flourished in the middle of the second century A.D. He refers to the inhabitants of the Irrawaddy Delta as cannibals.

These were not, however, the Burmese, for their migrations into the country had not started. In Ptolemy’s time the dominant race in Indo-China was Indonesian. It must have been strongly represented in Burma, since her modern inhabitants show clear traces of the mixture.