Origins of Funan
According to modern scholars drawing primarily on Chinese literary sources, a foreigner named "Huntian" established the Kingdom of Funan around the 1st century C.E. in the Mekong delta of southern Vietnam. Archeological evidence shows that extensive human settlement in the region may go back as far as the 4th century B.C.E. Though treated by Chinese historians as a single unified empire, according to some modern scholars Funan may have been a collection of city-states that sometimes warred with one another and at other times constituted a political unity.
The ethnic and linguistic origins of the Funanese people have been subject to scholarly debate, and no firm conclusions can be drawn based on the evidence available. The Funanese may have been Cham or from another Austronesian group, or they may have been Khmer or from another Austroasiatic group. It is possible that they are the ancestors of those indigenous people dwelling in the southern part of Vietnam today who refer themselves as "Khmer" or "Khmer Krom." (The Khmer term "krom" means "below" or "lower part of" and is used to refer to territory that was later colonized by Vietnamese immigrants and taken up into the modern state of Vietnam.) It is also possible that Funan was a multicultural society, including various ethnic and linguistic groups. The only extant local writings from the period of Funan are paleographic Pallava Grantha inscriptions in Sanskrit, a scholarly language used by learned and ruling elites throughout South and Southeast Asia. These inscriptions give no information about the ethnicity or vernacular tongue of the Funanese.
Read more about this topic: Kingdom Of Funan, History
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