archipelago has been part of many empires before the Spanish empire has arrived in the

16th century.

The pre-colonial Philippines uses the Abugida writing system that has been widely used in
writing and seals on documents though it was for communication and no recorded
writings of early literature or history [8] Ancient Filipinos usually write documents on
bamboo, bark, and leaves which did not survive unlike inscriptions on clays, metals, and
ivories did like the Laguna Copperplate Inscription and Butuan Ivory Seal. The discovery of
the Butuan Ivory Seal also proves the use of paper documents in ancient Philippines.

The arrival of the Spanish colonizers, pre-colonial Filipino manuscripts and documents
were gathered and burned to eliminate pagan beliefs. This has been the burden of
historians in the accumulation of data and the development of theories that gave
historians many aspects of Philippine history that were left unexplained.
<ref=SebastianUndated / /> The interplay of pre-colonial events, the use of secondary
sources written by historians to evaluate the primary sources, do not provide a critical
examination of the methodology of the early Philippine historical study.[9]

Organizations

Pre colonial period

Laguna Copperplate Inscription

Butuan Ivory Seal

Monreal stone

Pre-colonial Filipino noble couple

Indian culture has long reached the archipelago during the period of Pallava dynasty and
the Gupta Empire that led to the Indianized kingdoms established in the Philippines.[10][11] A
clear evidence is the use of pre-colonial Philippines use of honorific titles. No other
significant historical documents from this period except for Laguna Copperplate
Inscription, a legal document inscribed on a copper plate dated 900 CE which is the
earliest known calendar dated document found in the Philippines.[12][13]

Ma-i, an ancient sovereign state located in what is now the Philippines is notable in the
history of the Philippines for being the first place in the archipelago ever to be mentioned
in any foreign account which was first documented in 971 AD, in the Song dynasty
documents known as the History of Song.[14][15][16] Its existence was also mentioned in the
10th-century records of the Sultanate of Brunei.[17]

Until the year 1000 CE, maritime societies exists in the archipelago but there was no
significant political state unifying the entire Philippines.[18] The region included only
numerous small administrative divisions (ranging in size from villages to city-states) under
the sovereignty of competing thalassocracies ruled by datus, rajahs, sultans or lakans.[19]

Colonial period

Post colonial period

References

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Last edited 4 months ago by Wtmitchell