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The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
The 7 Wonders of Ancient Lanka | Part 1
Despite their iconic status, the original seven wonders of the ancient world pale in comparison to the seven wonders of ancient Lanka, the subject of the next three podcasts. But of them all, why include Panda Wewa, a reservoir now lost in the jungle, not from present-day Chilaw?
Despite their iconic status, the original seven wonders of the ancient world fall short compared to the seven wonders of ancient Lanka, the subject of this podcast.
The world’s first Seven Wonders were assembled in the 1st century BCE by the historian Diodorus of Sicily, with help from Herodotus, who began the tally 400 years earlier.
Their list, focused on the Mediterranean and the Near East, comprised a garden, two tombs, two statues, a temple, and a lighthouse. It featured the Pyramids of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria.
Sri Lanka’s list, though, is not all architecture with a nod to gardens – it is comprehensive, including a painting, a monastery, a book, a revolutionary new piece of technology that enabled a treasured dish, a shrine, a tree, and a lake.
It covers about a thousand years of the island’s earliest period of recorded history, from around 500 BCE to 500 CE. Each item is more than a mere wonder, for each helped set the abiding characteristics of the nation that has been called many magical names before settling on “Sri Lanka “– the Sanskrit words for shining island.
This apparent lexical borrowing is no random thing, for Sanskrit, a Bronze Age Indo-European language, is the lexis that has most influenced Sinhala, the language spoken by most Sri Lankans today. And its words, like the clues in an antique detective story, can be traced back to many others in European, Iranian, and North Indian languages.
Orphan language, it is most certainly not. Its lexical connections demonstrate the astonishing antiquity of the island’s culture, and the seven wonders explored here connect the country not just to its past but also to its present.
Invaded, occupied, plundered though it has been so often, there was ever something inimitably robust and resilient about its culture that ensured that the island, with each new renaissance, was able to use the best of its past to inform its future - with profound and confident certainty.
The story starts, quite inappropriately, where it ends - when the ancient world itself came crashing to a bloody end around the base of a 1000-foot mountain in central Sri Lanka in 495 CE.
With it ended one of the most notorious parties the world had yet enjoyed, one that, at 22 years, totally outlasted even Cleopatra’s Feast.
The party was Gatsbyesque in its exuberant excess. More opulent than the Rothschilds’ surrealist ball of 1972; more majestic than the Shah of Iran’s 2,500-year dynastic celebrations the year before, this party, like the ancient world itself, raced to its corporeal end with all the aplomb of the last serving of the previous martini on board the Titanic.
Of course, 500 CE is little more than a marker, a slender signal, a humble and iconic rounded-up figure invented by historians eager to bring closure to the world of the Romans and Greeks, the Pharaohs, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, or the Han. But the date has stuck.
Thereafter follow the medieval and early modern ages. And the later early modern age; even the later modern age, and our own post-modern age, an age shorn of parties, or glamour, decadent or otherwise.
Sri Lanka’s 22-year end-of-history party followed exactly the dates of the reign of one of its most outrageous kings, an equatorial Nero with mesmeric hints, like the best of expensive wines, of other things - Vlad the Impaler; Nebuchadnezzar, Louis XIV.
In joy, as Mark Twain observed, is sorrow, and Kashyapa, king, party giver, gourmand, and libertine, knew that his moment of doom was due to come sooner rather than later.
Gazing across the plains from his high fortress walls in Sigiriya, he would have been presciently aware that his brother would eventually arrive to stop all the fun.
And so he did. Commanding a specially recruited mercenary army from nearby India, Moggallana had come to take back what he considered his by right – the throne.
The legitimate son of Dhatusena, one of the country’s most fabulous kings, as his heir, Moggallana would have looked forward to a reign of plenty after his father had chased the occupying Dravidian Tamils from the kingdom, and rebuilt the country, tank by tank, temple by temple. It was years of milk and honey (or Kittel) he had in mind – not penurious exile.
But it was not to be. His half-brother, Kashyapa, played family politics with the skill of a card shark. He outmanoeuvred his brother and, with the help of the head of the army, deposed his father, Dhatusena.
Had things ended there, we may never have heard of Kashyapa. He would just have been yet another one of the island’s numerous coup d'état kings.
But with Oedipian or Macbethian instincts, Kashyapa went further. Much further. He began by entombing his father alive in his palace walls. For so distinguished a king, to be reduced to mere bricks and mortar was a shocking way to end a reign.
And to escape the widespread disapprobation this would have created, Kashyapa abandoned his capital of Anduraupura much as Tiberius had abandoned Rome for Capri and headed for Sigiriya.
Twenty-two years later, he was to watch his sibling nemesis gather on the plains below him, his army spilling out across the water gardens and pleasure terraces of his Alhambra-like palace.
The day was to end with the death of Kashyapa and the extinction of all that Sigiriya stood for - one of Asisa’s most remarkable pleasure palaces; the venue for a lifestyle that made living one long, spectacular party.
It's like, anywhere in Asia, was probably not seen again until the Kangxi Emperor built the Gardens of Perfect Brightness in the Old Summer Palace, outside Peking, some twelve hundred years later, in 1707.
A capital for just one reign, Sigiriya was a cross between the Tivoli, Akhenaten’s Amarna, and the Brighton Pavilion. It enjoyed every last innovation and refinement available – and there were many.
The world's most advanced water technology powers its fountains, lakes, wells, streams, and waterfalls. Artists whose frescoes equalled those of the later and faraway Leonardo da Vinci painted their perfumed inhabitants. Nothing was denied it – nothing until the Moggallana denied it everything.
The victorious brother returned the seat of government to the old capital, Anduraupura, like some brow-beaten and repentant deserter, ensuring that power was once again exercised with appropriate and demure propriety.
Even so, the world that ended in that sibling fight, fought just five years before the official end of the ancient world, would have felt more like a bump than an earthquake to the Anduraupura kingdom’s subjects.
Quite what these subjects numbered is the matter of modest academic dispute. It is likely to be far south of a million, which was the island’s population in 1800 CE.
Few though they were, the kingdom’s subjects had, by 495 CE, already chalked up nearly 1,000 years of recorded history since 543 BCE when they began their documented life as a small migrant township near Kuradamalai on the western coast of what is today the Wilpattu National Park.
Even after the fall of Sigiriya, the kingdom had almost five hundred years more life ahead of it. But they were years that grew just a little worse each Vesak. Despite an embarrassingly small number of luminous monarchs such as Manavanna or Sena II, dozens of more regicidally minded Anduraupuran kings drove their kingdom onto the hard shoulder of nationhood, setting it up perfectly - and fatally - for the annihilating invasion that was to destroy it in 993 CE when India’s Chola emperor, Rajaraja the Great, crossed over Adam’s Bridge.
But long before this moment – indeed almost at the very point at which Sigiriya itself fell - many of the island’s most significant monuments had already been built; its most important technical, religious, cultural, and artistic advances and inventions had already been made.
In many senses, Sri Lanka, by the time of the fall of Sigiriya, was pretty much done and dusted. Until the Portuguese arrived in 1505, much of what was to follow was something of an anticlimax.
But then this is to begin this account of ancient Lanka’s Seven Great Wonders the wrong way round: at the end with the ancient world of Sri Lanka’s seventh wonder, and not the beginning.
The beginning starts not in 495 CE but somewhere between 504 and 474 BCE: almost 999 years earlier. At a place called Panda Wewa, thirty kilometres from Chilaw and the soft, salty waters of the Laccadive lagoons – the first wonder of ancient Sri Lanka.
“There will,” stated Stephen King deferentially, “be water if God wills it.” But as any ancient Sri Lankan would have told him, this is only half the truth of the matter. Water, uncollected, undistributed, unpurified, is all but useless, however much the good Lord has allowed.
And water was what the island needed - especially in those areas first settled by migrants; for despite abundant monsoons, the water, uncollected, soon vanishes.
Ancient Sri Lanka was settled by its later migrants, mainly from the north to the south, and the north and central parts of the island are dry. Often, even, waterless. Which is why almost the first thing the new settlers did was to assemble around this most precious of resources every possible innovation and resource, from tanks and reservoirs, dams and canals, sluice gates, and the planting of different types of vegetation to promote purification or reduce evaporation.
All this started when, within 39 years of the arrival of Prince Vijaya, the founding father of the Singhala nation, its third – and still modest – king, Panduvasdeva, created the first notable man-made reservoir on the island: Panda Wewa.
Indeed, if historians and pundits are to be believed, Panduvasdeva’s tank was one of the world’s most notable man-made reservoirs. Unlike any of Diodorus’s wonders, its importance lay not simply in its pleasing visual beauty, but in the fact that it, quite literally, gave life to the land. Without it, there would have been few if any other later wonders, structural or otherwise, to commend.
What mattered was not whether Panda Wewa was Earth’s first man-made reservoir – but what it represented; and what it enabled. Hydrologists and historians, who have studied the remote and subdued landscape around it, believe that the king dammed a small river, the Kolamunu Oya, to create the reservoir, at one end of which he had situated his nascent capital, not far from the present-day Chilaw.
Unlike all other ancient reservoirs, not least the great pharaonic ones, this one was not created by simply filling a natural hollow with water, but by forming a dam to hold the water in and regulate its distribution. To get to this point, the industrial and engineering expertise possessed by the kingdom would have had to have been considerable. A capability to make bricks and cut stones would have been essential, as would the understanding of how to use them to create a sluice to regulate the flow of water to the city and the paddy lands. Construction, engineering, hydrology, mathematics, agriculture, and project management: all would have had to fuse with seamless genius.
Spanning one and a half miles at a height of 24 feet, the dam is cunningly partly made from natural rock to reduce the amount of stones and bricks required to hold back what was, for the time, a colossal amount of water - 416 million cubic feet within an area of 1,360 acres. Stones protected its slopes to minimise erosion, and the overall structure was sufficiently robust to withstand and release the immense quantities of water that gathered during monsoon times; its ability to withstand and release pressure was cleverly maximised by the design of an unusual twisting embankment that skirted low ground.
The tank was to last for over 2,300 years before it was finally breached by monsoon rains in 1805. Parts of its structure can still be seen today as you travel from Bingiriya to Wariyapola. Just past the Detiyamulla Sri Jettathissa Rajamaha Viharaya, you come across a concrete-block-paved lane, known as Gota Keta, where the partial remains of the ancient embankment disappear into the jungle.
Many far greater tanks, with much more advanced sluices, subtle canals, and structural designs that engaged the most brilliant attributes of engineering, were to be built across the island over the hundreds of years that followed. But this was the first one, the mother tank, the one that ignited Sri Lanka’s aqua power – a faculty that today not only still waters the land but also powers almost 60% of the country’s energy needs.
That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbrick at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy, at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.