A VANISHED EMPIRE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3148, 18 December 1922, Page 8

A VANISHED EMPIRE.

(By Bawsetf Digby, F.R.S.) Now and again one sees 9 passing reference in the news to the Dutch indies. The average man pictures them as a few little islands somewhere vaguely on the far side of our East Indies. We seldom realise the Malay Archipelago as a. huge far Hung expanse of rich tropical territory, running 3,000 miles east and west and 90(1 miles north and south, with a, native population of 50,000,000. Nearly half the territory is unexplored', and Holland seems in no hurry to develop it. She has held it tor about 320 years.

For ten centuries kbits region was the Empire of Zabedij, the strangest empire the world ha® ever known. Not a single, 'native historian's record' in that 1,000 years of Oriental pomp has survived. All the few hut reliable clues which we have had to it have to be dug out, like historical fossils, from the Hindu- puranas and the narratives' of the medieval geographers of Arabia,. The best account of this Vanished Empire was discovered in a remarkable mediaeval Arabic M.S. known as "The Voyage of Two Mohomedans," who travelled in India and China at the end of the ninth century. The Emperor of Zabedj then lived on Java, which even then was densely populated. East and west of Java the empire stretched from China to Cape Comorin. the southernmost tip of modern British India, and included Ceylon. Ceylon, lying between Arabia and China, was the emporium to which the merchants of each came to exchange the products of the west. lor aloes and camphor, sandalwood and ivory, ebony and spices. The Emperor of the "Vanished Empire had a novel hanking system. Every morning he made his Keeper of the Treasury throw a greal ingot of gold into the lake in front of the palace. On the. death of the Emperor the lake was drained, the ingots salved, and divided among the members of (.he Imperial Household.

Apparent!} the Vanished Empire's historians did not cut inscriptions in rock. Records of some sort they surely bad. but disaster, such as fire oi flood, or the always numerous .Malay siaii volcanic eruptions, must ha.vo overwhelmed them. Java to this day is cursed with severe earthquakes. One fateful day the earth may have opened and engulfed the Imperial archieves and Ihe red; sun have set on an empire that was doomed to lade from Ihe memorv of man.