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Óc Eo
Commune
Núi Ba Thê, thị trấn Óc Eo, huyện Thoại Sơn, An Giang; Mount Ba Thê ភ្នំបាឋេ, Óc Eo town អូរកែវ, Thoại Sơn district, An Giang Province.
Óc Eo Location in Vietnam
Coordinates: 10°15′17″N 105°9′6″E / 10.25472°N 105.15167°E / 10.25472; 105.15167Coordinates: 10°15′17″N 105°9′6″E / 10.25472°N 105.15167°E / 10.25472; 105.15167
Country	Vietnam
Province	An Giang Province
District	Thoại Sơn District
Time zone	UTC+7 (UTC+7)

Óc Eo (French, from Khmer: អូរកែវ, O Keo, "Glass Canal") is an archaeological site in Thoại Sơn District in southern An Giang Province, Vietnam, in the Mekong River Delta. Óc Eo may have been a busy port of the kingdom of Funan between the 1st and 7th centuries.

Scholars use the term "Óc Eo Culture" to refer to the archaeological culture of the Mekong Delta region that is typified by the artifacts recovered at Óc Eo through archeological investigation.

Óc Eo is also one of the modern day communes of Vietnam.

Archaeological site

Excavation at Óc Eo began on February 10, 1942, after French archaeologists had discovered the site through the use of aerial photography. The first excavations were led by Louis Malleret. The site covers 450 ha.

Óc Eo is situated within a network of ancient canals that crisscross the low flatland of the Mekong Delta. One of the canals connects Óc Eo to the town's seaport while another goes 68 kilometres (42 mi) north-northeast to Angkor Borei. Óc Eo is longitudinally bisected by a canal, and there are four transverse canals along which pile-supported houses were perhaps ranged.^[1]

Archaeological sites reflecting the material culture of Óc Eo are spread throughout southern Vietnam, but are most heavily concentrated in the area of the Mekong Delta to the south and west of Ho Chi Minh City. The most significant site, aside from Óc Eo itself, is at Tháp Muời north of the Tien Giang River, where among other remains a stele with a 6th-century Sanskrit text has been discovered.

Aerial photography in 1958 revealed that during the Funan period a distributary of the Mekong entered the Gulf of Thailand in the vicinity of Ta Keo, which was then on the shore but since then become separated by some distance from the sea as a result of siltation. At that time, Ta Keo was connected by a canal with Oc Eo, allowing it access to the Gulf.^[2] The distributary of the Mekong revealed in the aerial photography was probably the Saenus mentioned in Ptolemy’s Geography as the western branch of the Mekong, which Ptolemy called the Cottiaris.^[3] The Cattigara in Ptolemy's Geography could be derived from a Sanskrit word, either Kottinagara (Strong City) or Kirtinagara (Renowned City).^[4]

Remains

This statue of Visnu, Hindu deity of Indian-origin religion, from the 6th or 7th century AD was found in Óc Eo and is now housed in the Museum of Vietnamese History.

The remains found at Óc Eo include pottery, tools, jewelry, casts for making jewelry, coins, and religious statues.^[5] Among the finds are gold jewellery imitating coins from the Roman Empire of the Antonine period.^[6]:279[7] Roman golden medallions from the reign of Antoninus Pius, and possibly his successor Marcus Aurelius, have been discovered at Óc Eo, which was near Chinese-controlled Jiaozhou and the region where Chinese historical texts claim the Romans first landed before venturing further into China to conduct diplomacy in 166.^[8] Many of the remains have been collected and are on exhibition in Museum of Vietnamese History in Ho Chi Minh City.

Among the coins found at Óc Eo by Malleret were eight made of silver bearing the image of the hamsa or crested argus, apparently minted in Funan.^[9]

Óc Eo and Funan

The archeological site of Go Cay Thi, Ba The Oc Eo

Óc Eo has been regarded as belonging to the historical kingdom of Funan (扶南) that flourished in the Mekong Delta between the 1st and the 6th century CE. The kingdom of Funan is known to us from the works of ancient Chinese historians, especially writers of dynastic histories, who in turn drew from the testimony of Chinese diplomats and travellers, and of foreign (including Funanese) embassies to the Chinese imperial courts. Indeed, the name "Funan" itself is an artifact of the Chinese histories, and does not appear in the paleographic record of ancient Vietnam or Cambodia. From the Chinese sources, however, it can be determined that a polity called "Funan" by the Chinese was the dominant polity located in the Mekong Delta region. As a result, archeological discoveries in that region that can be dated to the period of Funan have been identified with the historical polity of Funan. The discoveries at Óc Eo and related sites are our primary source for the material culture of Funan.

The Vietnamese archaeologist and historian Hà Văn Tấn has written that at the present stage of knowledge, it was impossible to demonstrate the existence of a Funan culture, widely spread from the Mekong Delta through the Chao Praya delta to Burma, with Oc Eo as the typical representative: the presence of similar artefacts such as jewelry and seals from sites in those areas was simply the result of trade and exchange, while each of the sites bore the signs of their own separate cultural development. He supported the view of Claude Jacques that, in view of the complete lack of any Khmer records relating to a kingdom by the name of Funan, use of this name should be abandoned in favour of the names, such as Aninditapura, Bhavapura, Shresthapura and Vyadhapura, which are known from inscriptions to have been used at the time for cities in the region and provide a more accurate idea of the true geography of the ancient Khmer territory.^[10] Hà Văn Tấn argued that, from the late neolithic or early metal age, Óc Eo gradually emerged as an economic and cultural centre of the Mekong Delta and, with an important position on the Southeast Asian sea routes, became a meeting place for craftsmen and traders, which provided adequate conditions for urbanization, receiving foreign influences, notably from India, which in turn stimulated internal development.^[11]

Funan was part of the region of Southeast Asia referred to in ancient Indian texts as Suvarnabhumi, and may have been the part to which the term was first applied.^[12]

Kattigara of Ptolemy

The ancient canal linking Óc Eo to Angkor Borei

Óc Eo may have been the port known to the Romans as Kattigara.^[13] Kattigara was the name given by the 2nd-century Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy to the land on the easternmost shore of the Indian Sea at (due to a scribal error) 8½° south of the Equator.^[14]

The name "Kattigara" was probably derived from the Sanskrit Kirti-nagara कीर्ति- नगर “Renowned City” or Kotti-nagara कोटि-नगर “Strong City”.^[15]

Scholarship has now determined that Ptolemy's Kattigara was at 8½° north of the Equator and was the forerunner of Saigon as the main port and entrepot at the mouth of the Mekong.^[16]

Mr Caverhill "proves" the ancient Cattigara to be the same with the modern Ponteamass (Banteaymeas), The Monthly Review, Or, Literary Journal, Volume 40, 1769, p.98.

John Caverhill deduced in 1767 that Cattigara was the Mekong Delta port Banteaymeas (now Hà Tiên),^[17] not far from Óc Eo.^[18] The plea in 1979 by Jeremy H.C.S. Davidson for “a thorough study of Hà-tiên in its historical context and in relation to Óc-eo” as indispensable for accurate understanding and interpretation of the site, still remains unanswered.^[19]

The eighteenth-century French geographer, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, located Cattigara at the mouth of the Mekong (Cottiaris) River, where it is shown on his map, Orbis Veteribus Notus (The World Known to the Ancients).^[20]

Cattigara located at the mouth of the Mekong (Cottiaris) River, by d' Anville, Orbis Veteribus Notus (The World Known to the Ancients).

The Swedish yachtsman and writer Bjorn Landström also concluded, from the sailing directions given by the ancient merchant and seafarer Alexander, that Cattigara lay at the mouth of the Mekong.^[21]

The “father of Early Southeast Asian History”, George Coedès, has said: “By the middle of the 3rd century Fu-nan had already established relations with China and India, and it is doubtless on the west coast of the Gulf of Siam that the furthest point reached by Hellenistic navigators is to be found, that is the harbour of Kattigara mentioned by Ptolemy”.^[verify][22] A.H. Christie said in 1979 that “the presence of objects, however few in number, from the Roman Orient” added some weight to the conjecture that Óc-eo was the Ptolemaic Kattigara.^[23] The distinguished German classical scholar, Albrecht Dihle, supported this view, saying:

From the account of the voyage of Alexander referred to by Ptolemy, Kattigara can actually be located only in the Mekong delta, because Alexander went first along the east coast of the Malacca peninsula, northward to Bangkok, from thence likewise only along the coast toward the south east, and so came to Kattigara. We hear nothing of any further change of course. In addition, at Oc Eo, an emporium excavated in the western Mekong delta, in the ancient kingdom of Fu-nan, Roman finds from the 2nd century after Christ have come to light.^[24]

Columbus' search for Ciamba

Guided by Ptolemy, the discoverers of the New World were initially trying to find their way to Kattigara. On the 1489 map of the world made by Henricus Martellus Germanus, revising Ptolemy’s work, Asia terminated in its southeastern point in a cape, the Cape of Cattigara. Writing of his 1499 voyage, Amerigo Vespucci said he had hoped to reach Malacca (Melaka) by sailing westward from Spain across the Western Ocean (the Atlantic) around the Cape of Cattigara into the Sinus Magnus ("Great Gulf") that lay to the east of the Golden Chersonese (Malay Peninsula), of which the Cape of Cattigara formed the southeastern point. The Sinus Magnus was the actual Gulf of Thailand.^[25]

Christopher Columbus, on his fourth and last voyage of 1502–1503, planned to follow the coast of Champa southward around the Cape of Cattigara and sail through the strait separating Cattigara from the New World, into the Sinus Magnus to Malacca. This was the route he thought Marco Polo had gone from China to India in 1292.^[26] Columbus planned to meet up with the expedition sent at the same time from Portugal around the Cape of Good Hope under Vasco da Gama, and carried letters of credence from the Spanish monarchs to present to da Gama.^[27] On reaching Cariay on the coast of Costa Rica, Columbus thought he was close to the gold mines of Champa. On July 7, 1503, he wrote from Jamaica: “I reached the land of Cariay...Here I received news of the gold mines of Ciamba [Champa] which I was seeking”.^[28]

References

Sources

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Funan.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Óc Eo.

• Albert Herrmann, “Der Magnus Sinus und Cattigara nach Ptolemaeus”, Comptes Rendus du 15me Congrès International de Géographie, Amsterdam, 1938, Leiden, Brill, 1938, tome II, sect. IV, Géographie Historique et Histoire de la Géographie, pp. 123–8. English translation at [3]
  


• Albert Herrmann, “South-Eastern Asia on Ptolemy’s Map”, Research and Progress: Quarterly Review of German Science, vol.V, no.2, March–April 1939, pp. 121–127, p. 123.


• Albert Herrmann, Das Land der Seide und Tibet in Lichte der Antike, Leipzig, 1938, pp. 80, 84.


• Louis Malleret, L’Archéologie du delta du Mékong, Tome Troisiéme, La culture du Fu-nan, Paris, 1962, chap.XXV, “Oc-Èo et Kattigara”, pp. 421–54.


• John Caverhill, “Some Attempts to ascertain the utmost Extent of the Knowledge of the Ancients in the East Indies”, Philosophical Transactions, vol.57, 1767, pp. 155–174.


• Adhir K. Chakravarti, “Early Sino-Indian Maritime Trade and Fu-Nan”, D.C. Sircar (ed.), Early Indian Trade and Industry, Calcutta, University of Calcutta Centre of Advanced Study in Ancient Indian History and Culture, Lectures and Seminars, no. VIII-A, part I, 1972, pp. 101–117.


• George Cœdès, “Fouilles en Cochinchine: Le Site de Go Oc Eo, Ancien Port du Royaume de Fou-nan”, Artibus Asiae, vol.10, no.3, 1947, pp. 193–199.


• George Coedès, review of Paul Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese (Kuala Lumpur, 1961), in T'oung Pao 通報, vol.49, parts 4/5, 1962, pp. 433–439.


• George Coedès, “Some Problems in the Ancient History of the Hinduized States of South-East Asia”, Journal of Southeast Asian History, vol.5, no.2, September 1964, pp. 1–14.


• Albrecht Dihle, “Serer und Chinesen”, in Antike und Orient: Gesammelte Aufsätze, Heidelberg, Carl Winter, 1984, S.209.


• J.W. McCrindle, Ancient India as described by Ptolemy, London, Trubner, 1885, revised edition by Ramachandra Jain, New Delhi, Today & Tomorrow’s Printers & Publishers, 1974, p. 204:


• George E. Nunn, ‘The Three Maplets attributed to Bartholomew Columbus’, Imago Mundi, 9 (1952), 12-22, page 15; and Helen Wallis, ‘What Columbus Knew’, History Today, 42 (May 1992), 17-23.


• Quoted in J.M. Cohen (ed.), The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969, p. 287.


• Ha Van Tan, "Oc Eo: Endogenous and Exogenous Elements", Viet Nam Social Sciences, 1-2 (7-8), 1986, pp. 91–101.


• R. Stein, “Le Lin-yi 林邑, sa localisation, sa contribution à la formation de Champa et ses liens avec la Chine”, Han-Hiue 漢學, Bulletin du Centre d’Études sinologiques de Pékin, vol.II, pts.1-3, 1948, pp. 115, 122-3.


• R. Stein, review of Albert Herrmann, Das Land der Seide und Tibet im Lichte der Antike (Leipzig, 1938), in Bulletin de l’École Française d’ Extrême-Orient, tome XL, fasc.2, 1940, p. 459.


• Paul Lévy, “Le Kattigara de Ptolémée et les Étapes d’Agastya, le Héros de l’Expansion Hindoue en Extrême-Orient”, in XXIe Congrès Internationale des Orientalistes, Paris, 1948, Actes, Paris, Société Asiatique de Paris, 1949, p. 223.


• Paul Demiéville, review of R. Stein, “Le Lin-yi 林邑”, (Han-Hiue 漢學, vol.II, pts.1-3, 1948), in T'oung Pao 通報, vol.40, livres 4/5, 1951, pp. 336–351, n.b. pp. 338, 341.


• Paul Lévy, "Recent Archaeological Researches by the École Français d’Extrême Orient, French Indo-China, 1940–1945", in Kalidas Nag (ed.), Sir William Jones: Bicentenary of his Birth Commemoration Volume, 1746–1946, Calcutta, Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1948, pp. 118–19; paraphrased in R. C. Majumdar, Ancient Indian colonisation in South-East Asia, Baroda, B.J. : Sandesara, 1963, pp. 12–13.


• Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The archaeology of Fu Nan in the Mekong River Delta: the Oc Eo culture of Viet Nam ”, in Nancy Tingley and Andreas Reinecke, Arts of ancient Viet Nam: from River Plain to Open Sea, Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, 2009, pp. 100–118.


• Phạm Dức Mạnh, History of the South from the Original Advent of Civilization & Basic Material Relating to the Kingdom of Funan; Traditional Oc Eo Culture – Later Oc Eo (Research Material), Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh City National University Faculty of Social Science & Literature, 2009.


• Paul Wheatley, prefatory essay in Albert Herrmann, An historical atlas of China, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1966, p.xxviii.


• Srisakra Vallibotama and Dhida Saraya, “South-East Asia from ad 300 to 700: Oc-éo”, in Sigfried J. de Laet, History of Humanity, London, New York and Paris, Routledge and Unesco, Volume III, 1996, Joachim Herrmann and Erik Zürcher (eds.), From the Seventh Century BC to the Seventh Century AD, pp. 428–29.