The country has not kept written records of its own which can tell ancient civilizations that might flourished in antiquity for numerous reasons, like: (a) ancient libraries might had been burned down by the Spanish conquerors, (b) archives had been destroyed by World War II, and (c) the lack of archaeological and ancient studies.
The country has solely dependent on the ancient records of China, Japan, Tibet, India, Arabia, French Indo-China, Southeast Asian neighboring countries, and Europe. The said countries, regions, and continent respectively had both direct and indirect contact with the Philippines in general and Cebu in particular through trade and conquest.
THE TRADES IN ANTIQUITY
Long before Christ, there was already a trade contact between the Mediterranean, Arabia, India, China, French Indo-China, and Southeast Asia by way of the African trade route and of the maritime trade routes between the Indian Ocean and China.
There are three possible maritime trade routes between the Indian Ocean and China.
1. Arab and Indian merchants could have voyaged to the western shores on the Isthmus of Kra, part-way down the Malay Peninsula, where they could have taken on a Chinese cargo, either transshipped up the Strait of Malacca from the South China Sea, or brought overland from ports on the eastern side of the isthmus.
2. Alternatively, they could have loaded their cargoes at an entrepot such as Palembang before re-crossing the Indian Ocean to their home ports.
3. A third possibility is that they traded directly with China, perhaps via a south-east Asian port. All of these routes could have been used simultaneously.
In antiquity the lands between Africa, India, and China were considered most precious in terms of products like gold, silver, incense, and spices. Hence, the said terrestrial paradise was often called as the “lands of gold, silver, incense, and spices” in different languages. Biblical account called the region as Ophir. Indian texts called it Suvarnadvipa. Arab travelogues called it Zaba, Zabaj, or Zanj. Egyptians called it Zabag or Zabak. Chinese accounts called it Tabak, Shopo, Shepo, Zubu, Qin-san, and etc. Greeks called Iabadiu, Sabadibai, and Zabai. Indonesian manuscripts called it Nusantara. All of those were all referring to Southeast Asia in general and Java (Java Major) & Sumatra (Java Minor) in particular which then later on seemingly applied to refer the Malay Peninsula, Champa, Borneo, Sulawesi, Mindanao, Luzon, and Sugbu (Cebu).
Trade between the Arabs (particularly the Nabataeans), eastern Africa, the Mediterranean, India, China, and Southeast Asia flourished since the 13th century B.C. until the 16th century A.D.
The Sea People and the Phoenicians
Between 1180 and 1176 B.C., the Hittite and the Levant empires (except the Phoenicians) fell due to the invasions of the sea people.
In 1176 B.C., the sea people again invaded Egypt during the reign of Rameses III. A battle between Egypt and the sea people ensued somewhere at the shores of the eastern Nile Delta and partly on the borders of the Egyptian Empire in Syria. The said battle is known as the “Battle of the Delta” which has been described as “the first naval battle in history”. This major conflict is recorded on the temple walls of the mortuary temple of pharaoh Rameses III at Medinet Habu in great detail.2
After defeating the sea people on land in Syria, Rameses III rushed back to Egypt where preparations for the invaders assault had already been completed. When Rameses III looked at the sea, he stared at a formidable force, thousands of enemies, and possibly the end of the Egyptian empire. This was a turning point for the pharaoh, particularly the idea of having to fight a sea battle, because the Egyptians had never had to do this seriously before. Rameses III reacted with tactical brilliance; he lined the shores of the Nile Delta with ranks of archers who were ready to release volleys of arrows into the enemy ships if they attempted to land. Knowing that he would be defeated in the battle at sea, Rameses III enticed the sea-people and their ships into the mouth of the Nile, from where he struck his ambush. He had assembled a fleet for this specific occasion. In an inspired tactical maneuver, the Egyptian fleet worked the sea-people’s boats towards shore where the Egyptian archers, based on land, devastated the enemy with volley after volley of deadly arrows. Meanwhile, the Egyptian marine archers, calmly standing on the decks of their ships, fired in unison. Their ships were overturned, many were killed and captured and some even dragged to the shore where they were executed. Consequently, the sea people were defeated even when they were able to set foot on Egypt's land. As Rameses III states regarding the fate of the sea people who dared to attack Egypt:
"Those who reached my boundary, their seed are not; their hearts and their souls are finished forever and ever. As for those who had assembled before them on the sea, the full flame was their front before the harbor mouths, and a wall of metal upon the shore surrounded them. They were dragged, overturned, and laid low upon the beach; slain and made heaps from stern to bow of their galleys, while all their things were cast upon the water." 3
Every foreign power on the Mediterranean was destroyed in the face of the sea people’s onslaught; only the Egyptians were able to withstand their attack. However, this proved to be a pyrrhic victory, because in the end, Egypt were so weakened by it that it was never as powerful as it was prior to the sea people's invasion. The conflict with the Sea People also drained her treasury. Thus, the Egyptians used to say that “death comes from across the seas”.
While there is no documentation for any pursuit of the defeated sea people, who fled to Phoenicia, Egypt was saved from the fate of total destruction which befell Hatti, Alasiya, and other great Near Eastern powers. Rameses III could certainly content himself with a great and decisive victory. Although he had defeated the sea people, the Egyptian pharaoh could not ultimately prevent some of them from eventually settling in Canaan and Palestine some time after his death. The Egyptians did repulse the attack of the sea-people on their homeland, but the conflict exhausted and weakened Egypt's treasury to such an extent that she would never again recover to be a powerful empire. Rameses III is generally considered to be the last great pharaoh of Egypt's New Kingdom.
During this period also King Hiram of Phoenicia and King Solomon of Israel had sailed with their Arab sailors to Southeast Asia for trade.4 They were called as Indarapatra and Sulayman in the Malay epic of the same title which is very popular among the Maranaos of Mindanao who were believed to be migrants from Java and Sumatra in antiquity. 
In the Malay epic the invasions of Egypt in four waves were characterized into four mythical beasts – the giant octopus Kurita; the warlock Tarabusaw; the giant bird Pah; and the giant many-headed bird Ptah. It was said that Solomon (Sulayman) by the plea of his “brother” Hiram (Indarapatra) had come to the island of Mindanao to save Ophir from the invasions. With the magical signet ring and sword (known as Zulfikar) given by Hiram, Solomon had defeated all the beasts but he collapsed after befallen with the wing of the many-headed bird. It was raining when Hiram found Solomon’s dead body. The “holy water from the sky” filled the jar which was put beside Solomon. Believing that it was heavenly sent, Hiram poured the water from the jar on Solomon. Solomon awakened and told Hiram that he was only sleeping. After that incident Hiram saw a very beautiful maiden (known in Java as Dewi Kilisuci, the name suggests in Sanskrit that either she is a solar goddess or sun-worshipper, and in Sumatra as Puteri Bulukis, a female form of an imperial title Bulkeiah or Bulukiyah which is derived from a Malay word buluk which means bubbling water) running away and hid in the cave underground. The maiden vanished. Hiram then heard somebody laughing behind him and when he looked at its source he saw an old woman carrying the jar.4
In relation to this, the Javanese legendary history had also said that many years ago, the sage Mpu Bharada divided the land of Java into the kingdoms of Janggala (Kahuripan) and Panjalu (Kediri), with the purpose of settling a dispute between two brothers over succession, which was done magically by means of holy water sprinkled out of a jar from the sky.5
Moreover, in the Javanese texts, it stated that there was a time that the queen of Java came to Mindanao since it was its source of gold. The Javanese migrants were known then in Mindanao as “taw sa guiwa” (people of Java).6
In the 14th century, Marignolli wrote, inter alia, that the Queen of Sheba was the only daughter of Semiramis7, who had conquered India and Ethiopia and made her daughter the first ruler “of the finest island in the world, Saba by name.”8 Marignolli located Saba on Java.9
Ancient Sumatran chronicles also affirmed that the town of Lampong in North Sumatra was an ancient factory of merchants established by the Queen of Sheba, whereof one, named Nausem, sent her a great quantity of gold, which she carried to the Temple of Jerusalem, at such time as she went to visit the wise King Solomon; from whence she returned with a son, that afterwards succeeded to the Abyssinian Empire of Ethiopia, who was called as Prester John (King Menelik I of Axum).11 Incidentally, an Acehnese legend tells that the wali Hiram (Indarapatra) also visited the said factory of merchants in North Sumatra and that he was a brother of the Queen of Sheba, the wife of Solomon.12 Thus making Hiram the brother-in-law of Solomon.
Ahmad ibn Majid, 15th century A.D. Arab navigator and nautical writer, insisted that the suzerain of the Sumatran rulers was the king of Abyssenia, who, according to the most popular tradition, was descended from the Queen of Sheba and Solomon.13
There are Javanese manuscripts that claimed that some tribes in Java, Sumatra, Sunda, Papua, and neighboring islands were of Egyptian descent in antiquity.14 Interestingly, the Bugis royal house in South Sulawesi claimed that its genealogy could be traced back to Bilkis (Puteri Bulukis or the Queen of Sheba).15
Sheba or Shabat here is referred to the Southeast Asian empire in general, which at that time had accordingly included not only the entire Southeast Asia but also the entire Abyssinia & Egypt in eastern Africa, and the two islands – Java (the Proper) and Sumatra (the Minor) – in particular.16
Under the destructive force of the sea people’s attacks, all of the Phoenicians’ powerful adversaries had been destroyed. The Phoenician cities were untouched by this devastation that happened around them, which left these people in an advantageous position. The historical record shows their active cities quickly began to expand their domain by placing trading posts in Cyprus, the Aegean, Sicily, Sardinia, North Africa, Algeria, Morocco and Spain.17
The legacy of the sea people was that they had forcefully cleared away the old powers from the Mediterranean and left freshly plowed ground. In time the Greeks and Romans would rise and they—together with the often overlooked Phoenicians—would sow the seeds of Western civilization. The sea people gave rise to a powerful and wealthy sea-trading empire of the Phoenicians which stretched from Morocco to the Levant.18
Moreover, according to the findings of Dr. Stephen Oppenheimer as has been stated in his thesis book 'Eden in the East' (or The Malay Civilization, published under the Malay History Association which is a collective research efforts done by University of Hawaii), Malayo-Polynesians who were also referred to as Sumerians or Austronesians were the “people of the sea that once had an advanced civilization which brought the technology of rice domestication, copper wielding, animal domestication as well as water irrigation to the civilizations of ancient Egyptians and Babylonians during the post 3rd Great Flood due to the melting of ice caps”.
No doubt the ancient people of Southeast Asia specifically the orang laut (in reference to the three ethno-linguistic divisions of the “sea people” in Southeast Asia which included the Sama-Badjao, of which the ancient Cham people also belonged to) were actually the “sea people” that were referred to in Egyptian history. From this point of view, Southeast Asia had clearly become a maritime empire under the rule of a Phoenician monarch between the 13th & 8th century BC and of a Phoenician-descent monarch between 8th century BC & 16th century AD.
From the early contacts with the Semitic race, the Visayans in general and the Cebuanos in particular had: (a) loaned foreign Semitic words -- like the Aramaic “uyamut” which means “very poor” and “hiwwah” for “Eve” or “light” into “hiwa” for “slice” which is colloquially referring to the “slice of female” or “vagina”; Hebrew mana” which originally means as “share” for “inheritance”; “khamot” for “wisdom” into “kamao” for “wise” or “someone who knows or who has ability” and “maót” for “someone who pretends to be wise”; “khanaw” for “to dine in” into “kaon” for “to eat”; “charash” into “kawras” for “to scratch”; “dagan” for “to increase grain” into “daghan” for “many” or “to increase or multiply in number”; “damah” for “to compare” into “samah” for “similar” or “comparable with”; “dibbah” for “evil report” into “sibah” or “subah” for “to talk or insinuate evil”; “halak” into “lakaw” or “lakat” for “to walk”; “illaw” for “to ascend” into “bahyaw” for “to ascend or to raise”; “lawag” for “to speak” into “tawag” for “call”; “laphath” for “take hold” into “dapat” for “to touch or hit”; “moog” for “flow down” into “bol-og” for “flow” and “boog” for “flow down of earwax”; “pehsel” for “carve images” into “pisil” for “to massage”, “pîpî” for “to flatten a can”, “silsil” for “to sculpt or to carve”; “zabad” into “sabad or sabat” for “to confer”; “toanaw” into “laraw” for “purpose, aim, or goal”, and etc.; Syriac Abba for heavenly father; Ethiopian bana for husband; Arabic words ending in the suffix –at (like salamat, alamat, aklat, sulat, & etc.), grammatical syntax like putting suffixes –a and –i to change the state of a word like for example the rootword lamoy “to devour” into lamya which became a command meaning “Devour it!” or lamyi meaning “Devour a little of it”, and etc.; (b) learned to use the scales; adopted their system of laws and even their beliefs in fairies or deities which were called locally as “diwata” or later on as “dili ingon nato” (which have Semitic physical affinities in local myths); the practice of circumcision among males; and the belief in gabâ or divine nemesis.
Interestingly the belief in fairies especially in the island of Cebu is somehow connected with the Queen of Sheba, which is also known as the Queen of the South, and with King Solomon. The local fairy queen (already mentioned in some chapters of Unit III) is also a maritime trader believed to be either a daughter or a wife of Solomon, the king of the fairies (“king of the jinn” in Talmud & Midrash). In rabbinical accounts, King Solomon of Israel is also ruling over men, birds, and jinn. Though this is only a legend that has not been proven concretely it might probably be a memory rooted to a real physical trade contact with the said real personages with the people of Cebu especially of Balamban during the ancient times which remains in the psyche of the people from generation to generation.
Chinese & Arab trade relations
Between 1027 B.C. – 221 B.C., the Chou Dynasty came to power in northern China. During this time, Chinese rule was extended and there was increased trade with other nations. The Chou Dynasty was replaced by the Han Dynasty (202 BC - 220 AD), which is sometimes referred to as the greatest of all Chinese Dynasties. By 200 BC the Chinese culture had produced excellent craftsmen whose products were prized because of their beauty and specialty. Chief among these were products made of silk. During this period only China produced silk, which was exported to places as far away as Rome. Other Chinese exports included spices such as cassia and ginger, iron and jade.
From the earliest times, China conducted trade with Korea, both on land and by sea. From 140 BC regular trade fairs were held on the northern Chinese frontier, where furs and other valuable merchandise from Korea could be bought. Korean ships traveled along the coast, around the northern coast of the Yellow Sea to ports along the Shantung Peninsula, while others crossed the open sea to Nagasaki (Japan).
Farther south, China conducted trade using Chinese ships known as junks. These carried cargoes along the coast from Canton to Haiphong (today northern Vietnam). Junks left Haiphong and Foochow to travel via the Philippines to the Moluccas (Spice Islands) and to east Java. The journey took several months, and trade was mostly in cloves, nutmeg and mace.
From as early as 200 BC Chinese junks sailed to the Malay Peninsula and through the Strait of Malacca. There they met and traded with the Indonesian people and with merchants from east India.
It is interesting to note that the Han Dynasty conducted distant trade at the same time that the Nabataeans conducted sea trade. Both of these civilizations rose to power about the same time, and both of them waned at the same time. Interestingly enough, the Dong Son culture in North Vietnam (150 BC - 50 AD) corresponds to roughly the same time, which rose to prominence because of international trade of goods and ideas.
During the time of the Han Dynasty, Chinese products, such as silk reached the Roman Empire. Nabataean merchants not only traded in silk, but began to manufacture silk products in both Damascus and Gaza, known as Damask and Gauze silk products. Some historians have speculated that the rise in international trade during the period of 200 BC to 200 AD helped the Asian and Arabian civilizations rise to great heights, and acquire great wealth.19
Maritime Trade Routes to China and India
With their great quantity & variety of Chinese wares, Middle Eastern glass, and glazed pottery, Paem Pho and Ko Kho Khao on opposite sides of the Isthmus of Kra must have been the main entrepots (a commercial center where goods are received for distributions, transshipment, or repackaging) on the most frequently used trade route between China and the Middle East. 20
Chinese traveler I-Ching voyaged from China to Sumatra in AD 671 and wrote: "In the beginning of the autumn ... I came to the island of Kwang-tung, where I fixed the date of meeting with the owner of a Po-see (Arab) ship to embark for the south... at last I embarked from the coast of Kwang-chou (Guangzhou)." 26
According to Chinese records, the Persians (Po'ssi) and the Arabs (Ta'shish) seem to have dominated maritime trade with China at the height of the Tang Dynasty.22 They established settlements at Guangzhou, where they were sufficiently strong enough to sack the city in AD 758 and then evacuate as an act of retaliation against corrupt port officials. Chinese rebels then sacked Tangzhou in AD 760, reputedly killing thousands of Persians and Arab merchants. 23
After this, it seems that the Arab merchants abandoned the South China Sea and relied on south-east Asian shipping to supply the ports on either end of the Isthmus of Kra. These ports could have been operating for centuries, and the Arabs could have cut out the middle men by sailing directly to China, and they did this until they were forced to leave in 760 AD.
In AD 878 Huang-Chao burned and pillaged Guangzhou and murdered the foreign merchants along with many Chinese civilians.24 Arab geographer, Abu Zaid recorded that “no less than 120,000 Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Parsees perished”.25
An Arab source, the Muruj al-Dhahab, written by Mas'udi in AD 956 states:
"The ships from Basra, Siraf, Oman, India, the islands of Zabaj and Sanf came to the mouth of the river of Khanfu (Guangzhou, old Canton China) with their merchandise and their cargo (before AD 877-878). Then the trader went by sea to the land of Killah (Kedah) which is approximately half way to China. Today this town is the terminus for Muslim ships from Siraf to Oman, where they meet the ships which come down from China, but it was not so once... This trader then embarked at the city of Killah on a Chinese ship in order to go to the port of Khanfu."21
It can be concluded that 400 years after maritime trade had been started by the Nabataeans the Arabs from around the peninsula were entering into trade with Asia. As the Roman Empire crumbled, and their trade structures evolved, more and more Arab groups entered into maritime trade between the Europeans and the east.
Cross India Sailing
Ships often gathered at Muscat port before sailing directly across the Indian Ocean with the monsoon to Quilon on Southern Malabar. Other vessels took the coastal route, along the northern short of the Arabian Sea and down the west coast of India, but this route was fraught with many dangers, mainly from pirates.
From Malabar passage was made either to Ceylon, the Island of Rubies, or directly to the Nicobar Islands where water was taken on.
The next port of call was Kalah Bar (Kedah). Ships sailed from there to Sumatra, Java and on to China. Those going directly to China proceeded down the Malacca Strait stopped at Tioman Island for water and then carried on across the South China Sea to ports on Champa. From there they sailed to Canton, either via Hanoi or via the more direct route past the dangerous Paracel Reefs. The return voyage followed the same route in reverse.27
Middle Eastern traders used either the Malacca Strait, or the Sunda Strait on their journey, stopping at Srivijava for supplies.24 Fa Hsien boarded an Indian ship that could carry 200 passengers for his voyage from Sri Lanka back to China in AD 413.28
Later a Tang Dynasty text stated that the ships of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) were the largest of the foreign vessels.29 In AD 748 the Chinese monk Jianzhen noted that on his way from Hainan to Guangzhou he saw countless seagoing vessels from India, Persia, Kunlun (south-east Asia) and other countries.30
Indianized Kingdoms
These Indianized kingdoms developed a close affinity and internalised Indian religious, cultural and economic practices without significant direct input from Indian rulers themselves. While the issue remains controversial, it is thought that Indianization was the work of Indian traders and merchants as opposed to political leaders, although later the travels of Buddhist monks such as Atisha became important. Most Indianized kingdoms combined both Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and practices in a syncretic manner. Kertanegara, the last king of Singhasari, described himself as Sivabuddha, a simultaneous incarnation of the Hindu god and the Buddha.
Southeast Asian rulers enthusiastically adopted elements of raja-dharma (Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, codes and court practices) to legitimate their own rule and constructed cities, such as Angkor, to affirm royal power by reproducing a map of sacred space derived from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Southeast Asian rulers frequently adopted lengthy Sanskrit titles and founded cities, such as Ayutthaya in Thailand, named after those in the Indian epics.
Between the fifth and the early eleventh century, Sungai Mas in the Bujang Valley was the center of Kedah. Buddhist inscriptions found in the valley are evidence of Indian contact from the fifth to the sixth centuries.
A number of inscription dating from the fifth century have been found on the northwest coast of the Malay Peninsula and the Isthmus of Kra. One of the inscriptions found south of the Muda River in Kedah, in an area known today as Seberang Perai, mentions a sea captain known as Buddhagupta who was a resident of “Raktamrttika”. The latter name is not used in India, and its meaning of “Red Earth”, or Tanah Merah in Malay, is a common place name on the peninsula. It may be a reference to Chitu (“Red Earth” in Chinese), a kingdom on the east coast of the peninsula, which was also an area of significance during this period. The texts of these inscriptions found in an area between Gunung Jerai and the Muda River indicate that this area was already intellectually and commercially linked to the outside world by the fifth century.
In the seventh century, it became a collecting point of local products for an expanded trade in the Straits. At a time when mariners could not calculate longitude but could determine their latitude through stars, Southeast Asian ships could sail due west from Kedah to reach southern India or Sri Lanka, while Indian ships went due east to Kedah. Sometime in the fifth century, Buddhagupta of “Red Earth” inscribed a prayer on stone at Bujang Valley before setting sail for India, and the Chinese pilgrim Yijing stopped in Kedah in 671 on his way to study Buddhism in India. Indian traders obviously found Kedah an important landfall, and even after Şrivijaya became the overlord of Kedah (by 685), Indian sources continued to regard Kedah, not Palembang, as the center of Şrivijaya. Archaeological discoveries of large shell midden sites in Kedah and directly across the way in east Sumatra are indications that these were areas of substantial populations. There is no evidence, however, that the Sumatran site was ever a trade port, which suggests that it may have provided the forest products that were then brought to the trading port of Kedah. The pattern of collection centers of local products serving major trade emporiums became well-established in the history of the straits of Melaka.
From the end of the tenth century the center in Kedah gradually shifted from Sungai Mas to Pangkalan Bujang, located on the first firm ground after the mangroves of the Merbok estuary, which maintained its dominance until the end of the fourteenth century. In the nearby Kuala Seligsing site in Perak, identified as a ‘feeder point’ most likely supplying an entrepot in “Bujang Valley, locally made beads, some from recycled foreign glass, as well as clay, bronze and iron items were found. Similarity of pottery designs on the Malay Peninsula, southeastern Sumatra and southwestern Borneo, and the discovery through metallurgical analysis that gold used in ritual deposits in a tenth to eleventh century temple in Kedah originated from western Borneo, are evidence of trade between these areas. The said links dating back to the period of migrations of the Melayu from their homeland in western Borneo to the new areas of settlement in southeast Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula were not severed until such time in 1300 that the sites of southern Kedah and Kuala Selinsing were abandoned.
Cultural and trading relations between the powerful Chola kingdom of South India and the Southeast Asian Hindu kingdoms led the Bay of Bengal to be called "The Chola Lake" and the Chola attacks on Şrivijaya in the tenth century AD are the sole example of military attacks by Indian rulers against Southeast Asia. The Pala dynasty of Bengal, which controlled the heartland of Buddhist India maintained close economic, cultural and religious ties, particularly with Şrivijaya.
A defining characteristic of the cultural link between Southeast Asia and Indian subcontinent is the spread of ancient Indian Vedic/Hindu and Buddhist culture and philosophy into Myanmar, Thailand, Malaya, Laos and Cambodia. Indian scripts are also found in Southeast Asian islands ranging from Sumatra, Java, Bali, south Sulawesi and most of the Philippines.32
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