“Indian influence in Indonesia was not primarily the result of Indian efforts to expand their sphere of influence and to export their own culture, but the fruit of Indonesian initiatives to assimilate those Indian elements that appealed to them and that seemed to fit best into the pattern of their own culture. The approach of the Indonesian who visited the Holy Land of Buddhism and Hinduism was an eclectic approach, one of picking and choosing instead of absorbing indiscriminately.”
–Jan Fontein

The earliest Indonesians in the anthropological sense probably arrived in the islands of Southeast Asia between three and four thousand years ago, at which time they largely superceded earlier populations. The linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that these natives may have crossed over from the Chinese mainland via Taiwan and the Philippines.

More than five hundred years before Columbus set sail on his inaugural voyage of discovery, the natives of island Southeast Asia–together with their Polynesian descendants–explored and occupied an area that spanned from Madagascar in the west to the islands of the South Pacific in the east, an area that represents more than 206 of the Earth?s 360 degrees of longitude. Pliny the Elder was the first western historian to mention the accomplishments of these amazing seafarers. Composed during the first century of the Common Era (CE), Pliny’s Natural History refers to merchant ships out of Asia who were engaged in trade with the East Coast of Africa. Modern anthropologists have been able to assemble a body of linguistic and genetic evidence that strongly supports the proposition that the island of Madagascar was colonized nearly two thousand years ago by natives from island Southeast Asia.

The earliest known book to attempt to map world geography was written by the Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy toward the end of the first century CE. In the ?Geographia, Ptolemy wrote about an island located to the east of the Indian subcontinent called Labadius. The island “… is said to be a most fruitful one, and to produce much gold,” wrote Ptolemy. “It has a metropolis on the north side toward the west called Argentea….” The name Labadius probably was derived from the Indian Sanskrit word Yavadvipa, the name that the natives of the Indian subcontinent first used to refer to the island of Java in religious texts that were written in the third century BCE (Before Common Era). Archaeological digs in western Java have produced Chinese ceramics that date from the period of the Han dynasty that once ruled China during the opening centuries of the Common Era. These important discoveries demonstrate that western Java had indeed once been a stop-over point along the maritime trade route that connected China with India and Persia. In addition, a Chinese text has been found that describes a mission to China from an undisclosed port that was ruled by King Devavarman. Some scholars believe that this port city may have been located on the coast of western Java. (1)

Anthropologists believe that the natives of island Southeast Asia first began their exploration of the South Pacific about 3,500 to 4,000 years ago. To navigate from island to island, these early sailors had to memorize the vertical star path for any given destination and then sail in the direction of that path by holding the ship?s mast to fix the boat’s direction onto one or more of the stars in the constellation. It is only at locations relatively near the Earth?s equator that the constellations present star paths that are nearly perpendicular to the horizon. This may account for the fact that these native Indonesian explorers were able to navigate over vast distances long before Europeans were able to perform similar maritime feats.