The Seven Wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka

Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka

Although The Seven Wonders of Ancient Lanka is given over to exploring and celebrating the seven greatest wonders of the ancient Sri Lankan world, it is dedicated to the country’s paramount modern wonder, Marina Hussein.

Despite their iconic status, the original seven wonders of the ancient world come up short when compared to the seven wonders of ancient Lanka, this subject of this podcast.
The world’s first Seven Wonders was assembled in the 1st century BCE by the historian, Diodorus of Sicily, albeit with help from Herodotus who began the tally 400 years earlier.
Their list, focused on the Mediterranean and 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 as it does a painting, a monastery, a book, a piece of revolutionary new technology that enabled a treasured dish, a shrine, a tree, and a lake.
It covers around a thousand years of the island’s first 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 of an antique detective story, can be traced right back to many others that occur 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, likewise, 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 deep 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 out lasted even Cleopatra’s Feast.
The party was Gatsbyesque in its exuberant excess. More opulent than the Rothschild’s 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 last 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 that has been invented by historians eager to bring closure to the world of the Romans and Greeks, the Pharaohs, Assyrians, Hittie, Persians, or Han. But the date has stuck.
Thereafter follows the medieval age, the early modern age. 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 greatest kings, as his heir, Moggallana would have looked forward to a reign of plenty after this 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 a cardsharp’s skills. He out manoeuvred his brother, and, with the help of the head of 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 Oedipean 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 in much the same way 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 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.
Its like, anywhere in Aisia, 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 most advanced water technology in the world powered its fountains, lakes, wells, streams, and waterfalls. Artists whose frescos equalled those of the later and faraway Leonardo da Vinci painted its perfumed inhabitants. Nothing was denied it – nothing until the Moggallana denied it everything.
The victorious brother returned the seat of government back 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 fare 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...