Place · island chain · Maldives
The Maldives
Also known as The Maldives — the thousand islands of the Tanjore list
The Tanjore inscription claims the old islands of the sea numbering twelve thousand among Rajaraja's conquests, and the Cholas seem to have exercised some real authority over the Maldive atolls — the source of the cowrie currency that Bengal and West Africa ran on, and of the coir that rigged Indian Ocean ships.
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 4.176, 73.509
Worth knowing
Cowries from these atolls were the small change of the Bengal economy into the nineteenth century and of the West African slave trade, which makes the Maldives one of the few places whose principal export was money. The islands converted to Islam in 1153, about eighty years after the Chola period ended.
Connections (3)
- CampaignRājarāja I
The Tanjore inscription lists the old islands of the sea numbering twelve thousand among Rajaraja's conquests, which is taken to mean the Maldive atolls — and the Cholas seem to have exercised real authority there for a period. The islands' principal export was cowrie shell, which served as small change in Bengal into the nineteenth century and in the West African slave trade, so the Cholas briefly controlled a currency supply rather than a territory.
- Imperial administration ofQutb complex, Delhi
He was qadi of Delhi on a salary he calls colossal and then qadi of the Maldives on his own authority, and both appointments went the same way: a foreign judge trying to enforce law on a population and a court that had their own arrangements. He fell under suspicion in Delhi and quarrelled with the vizier in Male, and left both in a hurry.
- TransmissionGrantha script
The Maldivian script belongs to the South Indian family. Dhives Akuru descends from Brahmi and its earliest inscriptions closely resemble South Indian epigraphy of the sixth to eighth centuries, with the later cursive forms standing near the medieval scripts of Sri Lanka and the Tamil country — Sinhala, Grantha and Vaṭṭeḻuttu — and some Kannada-Telugu elements. It was written left to right, unlike the Thaana that replaced it, and was still used in the southern atolls into the nineteenth century.
On these journeys
- Chola expeditions overseas — Lanka, the Maldives and Srivijaya
- Ibn Baṭṭūṭa — qāḍī, exile, envoy (1333–1347)
Sources
Wikipedia, “Maldives”. The Thanjavur (Brihadishvara) inscriptions in South Indian Inscriptions II; Hermann Kulke, K. Kesavapany and Vijay Sakhuja (eds), Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa (2009).
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