Maldive priest-kings? Legends of prehistoric contact across the Indian Ocean

Climate change is threatening the existence of the Maldives, a part of the world densely inhabited by both marine organisms and humans; by 2070, most, if not all of the country's cities, towns and ports will be submerged in a highly acidic Indian Ocean. Due to rapid urban development in recent years, archaeology of the archipelago's historic and prehistoric past is difficult, if not impossible, and what archaeology there is consists of reports of small finds and sunken features supporting to varying extents texts and oral tradition. Like every other place on Earth, the people of the Maldives have in their native tradition their own semi-mythical ancestors; the Dheyvis, who came from the sea from a land called Kalibangan around 1680 - 1580 BCE, who were in turn succeeded by the Redis, Sarandivis and finally the Aryas, or communities from northern India, around 500 BCE, who introduced Hinduism to the archipelago. The Dheyvies used boats known as dhoani to travel to the Maldives, which became the backbone of their maritime economy. The Maldives remained a polytheistic, Buddhist and Hindu country until their conversion to Islam in 1153 CE. 

Can archaeology provide a kernel of truth to these legends? One of the first extensive excavations was that of the British archaeologist HCP Bell in 1922, who set out to prove that Buddhism was once widespread in the Maldives in the early first millennium CE, and discovered a number of Buddhist monuments, holy places and temples similar to those found on Sri Lanka, which dated as late as the 11th century CE. Two following investigations in 1948 and 1958 explored several enigmatic coral stone features and artefacts on the archipelago, which turned out to suggest early contacts with the Indonesian islands. It was only in 1981/2, and later from research by the Kon-Tiki navigator Thor Heyerdahl, that something even more exciting was raised; materials imported from the Indus Valley Civilization, otherwise known as Harappa or Meluhha in Akkadian records. Carved on coral slabs was a kind of hieroglyph that appeared to relate to the script found on Harappan trade seals, depicting solar reliefs. Despite a subsequent flurry of sensationalised reports, however, expert analysis determined them to be Buddhist symbols, and the slab part of a ruined stupa. 

The ruined site of Gamu Haiytheli, a Buddhist stupa dating to the 3rd century CE, and once thought by Thor Heyerdahl on the basis of inscriptions on nearby coral masonry to be evidence of contact with the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia.

If an answer can't be found in monuments and symbols, then more mundane artefacts might provide a clue. Cowrie shells are common across the Maldives and found rarely elsewhere, and a few have been found at the Indus Valley port town of Lothal, and even earlier, cowries were placed on the eyes of skull of a women buried in Jericho circa. 5000 BCE, as well as a Yin Dynasty tomb dated to c.1300 BCE. The characteristic dhoani of the early Maldives further bear resemblance to Mesopotamian and Indus Valley papyrus reed-built vessels, and more particularly resemble later Phoenician wooden plank vessels (the so-called Byblos Ships of the late 3rd millennium BCE) , although made of local reeds. However, many New World and east Asian societies built similar ships at different time periods with no possible inspiration from the Near East, so it might be instead be an independent emergence; a product of chance or necessity, using the available resources to trade and fish; much in the same way that agriculture and pastoralism emerged independently in several areas in the Indian subcontinent. 

A thriving and industrious trade route from the Persian Gulf, along the Indus estuary and down to Sri Lanka is, however, well attested by Greek and Roman sources, not least the Periplous of the Erithryean Sea (c. 1st century CE) and the account of the 6th century voyage of the monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, the Christian Topography. This was held together by both sturdy long-distance vessels and reed-built river boats, so it is not a stretch of the imagination to think that a similar network, if scaled down and intermittent, only in times of prolonged prosperity, might have existed in the Bronze Age. After all, the Sumerians knew about and traded by sea with Bahrain, eastern Iran and the Indus Valley (referring to them as Dilmun, Marhashi and Meluhha respectively), which indicates that they had contacts more than 2,800km away. The distance between Lothal and the Maldives is around 2,000km, so it was easily possible.

There are a few coral slabs and symbols that remain a mystery, but the probability is that they do not have anything to do with the Indus Valley civilization, even if they are prehistoric. On the whole, it is plausible that the origin legends of the Dheyvies arose from intermitten contact with communities in northern India and southwest Asia, invested in obtaining cowrie shells, just as much as the world's supply of lapis lazuli came from the Indus Valley mining colony of Shortugai, in northern Afghanistan. 

The name Dheyvies is also interesting, as it could relate to the Daevas, the evil spirits and mythological enemy tribe of the oldest Zorastrian texts, which are though to date around 1000 BCE. These are thought to be the same as the Hindu devas, the divine beings of the cosmos associated with the forces of light. Scholars across the centuries have hypothesised that the conflict between the ahuras / asuras and the daevas /devas as a folk memory for the Indo-Iranian migration into south Asia, toppling the BMAC and Indus Valley civilization and adopting some of their culture in the process. 

There is a case, therefore, that the Dheyvies could well be seafarers from northern India or eastern Iran, and to wrap things up, it's likely that the Maldives and the south Indian coast were known about as a rich area of the world in the Bronze Age. Perhaps fleeing Indo-Iranian invasions and a general economic decline, Harappan families chose to board the next boat and sail to a sunnier and more tropical land. 

References:

Forbes, A. D. (1987). The pre-Islamic archaeology of the Maldive Islands. Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, 76, 281-288.

Mohamed, N. (2005, December). Maldivian seafaring in the pre-Portuguese period. In 10th International Conference on Sri Lanka Studies, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka (pp. 16-18).