• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Thailand - Pre-History - to 250 AD

The earliest known inhabitation of present-day Thailand dates to the Paleolithic period, about 20,000 years ago. Archaeology has revealed evidence in the Khorat Plateau in the northeast of prehistoric inhabitants who may have forged bronze implements as early as 3000 BC and cultivated rice during the fourth millennium BC. In the ninth century BC, Mon and Khmer people established kingdoms that included large areas of what is now Thailand. Much of what these people absorbed from contacts with South Asian peoples—religious, social, political, and cultural ideas and institutions — later influenced the development of Thailand’s culture and national identity. In the second century BC, the Hindu-led state of Funan in present-day Cambodia and central Thailand had close commercial contact with India and was a base for Hindu merchant-missionaries. In the southern Isthmus of Kra, Malay city-states controlled routes used by traders and travelers journeying between India and Indochina (present-day Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam).

Over the course of millennia, migrations from southern China peopled Southeast Asia, including the area of contemporary Thailand. Archaeological evidence indicates a thriving Paleolithic culture in the region and continuous human habitation for at least 20,000 years. The pace of economic and social development was uneven and conditioned by climate and geography. The dense forests of the Chao Phraya Valley in the central part of Thailand and the Malay Peninsula in the south produced such an abundance of food that for a long time there was no need to move beyond a hunting-and- gathering economy. In contrast, rice cultivation appeared early in the highlands of the far north and hastened the development of a more communal social and political organization.

Excavations at Ban Chiang, a small village on the Khorat Plateau in northeastern Thailand, have revealed evidence of prehistoric inhabitants who may have forged bronze implements as early as 3000 BC and cultivated rice around the fourth millennium BC If so, the Khorat Plateau would be the oldest rice-producing area in Asia because the inhabitants of China at that time still consumed millet. Archaeologists have assembled evidence that the bronze implements found at the Thai sites were forged in the area and not transported from elsewhere. They supported this claim by pointing out that both copper and tin deposits (components of bronze) are found in close proximity to the Ban Chiang sites. If these claims are correct, Thai bronze forgers would have predated the "Bronze Age," which archaeologists had traditionally believed began in the Middle East around 2800 BC and in China about a thousand years later.

Before the end of the first millennium BC, tribal territories had begun to coalesce into proto-historical kingdoms whose names survive in Chinese dynastic annals of the period. Funan, a state of substantial proportions, emerged in the second century BC as the earliest and most significant power in Southeast Asia. Its Hindu ruling class controlled all of present-day Cambodia and extended its power to the center of modern Thailand. The Funan economy was based on maritime trade and a well-developed agricultural system; Funan maintained close commercial contact with India and served as a base for the Brahman merchant-missionaries who brought Hindu culture to Southeast Asia.

The absurd statement that the Hsien or Siem — i.e., the population of Siam — are descended from the Ch'ih-mei or "Red Eyebrows" Rebels, who in AD 25 overthrew the Han Dynasty, appears to have been first concocted by the compilers of the Ming-yi fung-chih, the Great Geography of the Ming Dynasty, a comparatively modern work. Mr. Leon de Rosny was one of the warmest endorsers of this slipshod theory, which he delightd to quote wherever he prattles about Siam and the Siamese. It needed but little muster of arguments to completely explode it. The Ch'ih-mei could not be the the Hsien or Siem proper — because they were not finally crushed until about AD 30, at which date the State just mentioned must have been already in existence, since it is recorded under the name Samaradi by Ptolemy a century later, from information collected undoubtedly at a much earlier period. On the other hand, the Ch'ih-mei could not be populations of Thai race, since the forbears of this people are known from the Chinese records themselves to have been in occupation of Southern Yunnan and Northern Indo-China from the beginning at least of the Christian era, and to have attacked the southern borders of the then as yet diminutive Chinese Empire several times before AD 47. Even admitting that some of the remnants of the dispersed "Red Eyebrows" bands attempted to cross those borders in order to take refuge in Yunnan, they would have been egregiously stopped by the Thai populations referred to. The statement as regards the Ch'ih-mei having been the progenitors of the Siem must therefore be ranked on a par with the "Red Earth" theory and other historical and philological absurdities and puerilities which form so exhilarating a feature of Chinese literature.