The Rise, Glory, and Legacy of the Mataram Kingdom, 732-1016 CE - Michael Staines

The Rise, Glory, and Legacy of the Mataram Kingdom, 732-1016 CE

The island of Java sits at the centre of the world. Ringed by smoking volcanoes whose ancient eruptions built one of the most fertile agricultural landscapes on earth, Java became, between the 8th and 11th centuries CE, the heartland of a civilization of extraordinary ambition and depth. The Mataram Kingdom, founded by the warrior-king Sanjaya in 732 CE and shaped by the creative tension between Shaivite Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism, produced some of the greatest monuments in human history. Borobudur, the largest Buddhist structure ever built, rises from the volcanic plain as a three-dimensional map of the cosmos in stone. Prambanan answers it across the same plain with towers soaring forty-seven metres toward heaven, their surfaces alive with the story of Rama and Sita carved by craftsmen of genius. But the Mataram Kingdom was far more than its temples. It was a sophisticated civilization of Sanskrit scholars and Old Javanese poets, of royal administrators and rice farmers, of queens who built temples and monks who preserved the wisdom of India in tropical manuscripts. This is the complete story of that civilization, its founding, its golden age, its catastrophic destruction, and the extraordinary legacy it left to the world.