ABSTRACT
Among the several factors responsible for the rise of principalities and kingdoms in early Southeast Asia, agriculture and maritime trade must be deemed the most important. The earliest kingdoms known to have existed in Southeast Asia were of the Malay people, who profited as intermediaries in the east-west and Sino-Indian trade. Larger and more powerful prosperous kingdoms—Funan and Champa—therefore grew up elsewhere on the eastern littoral of the Indo-Chinese peninsula. Funan and Champa were Hindu kingdoms. The people who supplanted the Funanese supremacy were the Khmers, ethnically related to the Mons of Lower Myanmar. An even more important decision of Jayavarman II was to revive the Devaraja cult of Indian origin, intended to legitimize and bolster his authority over all the dissident groups among the Khmer people. The people responsible for the defeat of the Pyus were the Burmans, or Tibeto-Burmans, whose descendants form the majority of Myanmar's population today.
