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- Sri Lanka’s Moriyan Kings Part 1 | The Lion’s Paws What is it about Sri Lanka’s lion – cherished by the Moriyan kings at Sigiriya and elsewhere – that so perfectly captures one of the country's most critical national traits? To Tanzania goes the mane. Sri Lanka excepted, the land boasts more lions than any other country. Admittedly, Sri Lanka’s capacious pride of lions is a depiction rather than a collection of living, breathing, roaring specimens – but right across the island, lions dominate the scene with a flamboyance that had much to teach the muted heraldic beasts on such other national flags as Spain or Paraguay. Fluttering with pride across a million or more flagpoles from banks to private houses, government buildings to temples, lions have also given their name to any number of other things - from Lion tea to Lion larger, from Mount Lavinia’s Lion Pub to Galagedera Royal Lion Hotel, from soaps, cars, jewellers, insurance sales forces and even pop groups down south in Henakaduwa. Statues of the beast also found their way into early temples, palaces, and monasteries - unfloutable sentinels of the great buildings of the state. But quite how lions got here is a matter of simmering altercation amongst vexillologists. Some point the finger at Prince Vijaya, others at King Dutugemunu, and still others at King Nissan Kamalla. But whatever the truth of the matter, there is more to the lion than just flags or brand names. That lions should assume so central a role is a victory of sorts for Panthera Leo Sinhaleyus, a subspecies of the lion unique to Sri Lanka, which became extinct in 37,000 BCE – about the same time as the island’s famous Stone Age Balangoda Man walked his own last steps. Its discovery only came to light in 1936, when the archaeologist P.E.P. Deraniyagala uncovered two fossilised teeth in Kuruwita, near Ratnapura. With the passion of a forensic detective, the archaeologist studied his modest clutch of exhumed teeth. One was so damaged as to be of little use in identifying anything, but the other, a left molar, presented such a distinctive structure as to not just twin it with lions but also set it apart from all known lion species. The discovery was later validated by a further breakthrough in 1962, when a complete right-limb middle phalanx of the same species was found. From these fragile artefacts, a lost subspecies was uncovered, its size indicating that the beast was a lion much larger than the present Indian lion. Back in 37,000 BCE, Sri Lanka was a very different place from what it would become, an island of open grasslands – a habitat perfect for lions, and big ones at that. But over time, as the monsoon rain fuelled the proliferation of trees, its habitat became ever more restricted and at some point, the creature just died out. Today, the Sri Lankan lion’s paramount historical descendant sits at the feet of what islanders call the eighth wonder of the ancient world - Sigiriya Rock. This massive lump of granite - a hardened, much-reduced magma plug – is all that is left of an extinct volcano. Lost in forests, inhabited by hermit monks between the third century BCE and the first century CE, it was exposed by colossal landslides and then selected by King Kashyapa I (or his father) as the location of a new fortress capital in 477 CE. Guarding the staircase to an ancient fortress, six hundred feet above, are the two immense animal paws, rediscovered during excavations in 1898, all that remains of a crouching sphinx-like lion that guarded the palace entrance. Built with bricks and limestone, the lion’s full height was 45 feet. The rest of the creature lies in dust around the site, but even so, it gave its name to the place: “Sigiriya,” the Sinhala for “Lion’s Rock.” Gazing at it, the most irresistible connection is, of course, to the legendary Egyptian pharaoh, Rameses II, recalled by Shelley in his poem Ozymandias: I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Sigiriya, like the palace of the King of Kings, is as much a ruin as the lion paws that yet defend it. Each mitten is a sorrowful remnant exemplifying the accepted and formidable face of authority and statehood. From King Pandu Kabhaya founding Anuradhapura around 437 BCE, thereby marking the tangible beginnings of the Sri Lankan island state, to the inheritance enjoyed by the first Moriyan king, Dhatusena, in 463 CE, 900 years of solid national building had been achieved. Over those many centuries, an entire kingdom and culture had been consolidated, and an ancient state had thrived. Under, first, the Vijayan, and then the Lankbranaka, dynasties, a one-state government came to dominate the entire island, its grand writ running through countless villages from north to south, east to west, by means of the intricate bureaucratic, legal, and administrative structures that ordered its religion, water resources, taxation, and trade. At every stage, this sophisticated ordering of society was reinforced by caste demarcations that arose at least as early as 543 BCE with the arrival of the founding father, Prince Vijaya. With him came a variety of castes, most notably the Govigama – the landowners. A complex and hereditary feudal system soon developed from this, its voluminous obligations derived from work ordered by the king – the Rajakariya - for an astonishingly comprehensive set of occupations from toddy tapping to coconut growing, hair cutting to fishing. The state's managed bureaucracy had hierarchies so finely tuned that they even trickled down to village officials tasked with managing sluice gates and tanks. The arrival of Buddhism in the 3rd century BCE fortified and compounded these meticulous arrangements. That the state was strong – able to endure even the suicidal excesses of some of its kings, to shrug off occasional invasions, civil wars, and droughts – was in large part due to the enduring capabilities of the social order that underwrote the kingdom. This institutionalised aptitude allowed the nation to function when even, at times, the government itself did not. Even - all too often - when the island’s very social order was manifestly unfair and destructive, it remained a firm and formative force. “Sure,” cried John Steinbeck’s tenant farmer, “but it’s our land…We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours.” Sri Lanka’s lion - most memorably exemplified by that built by the early Moriyan kings at Sigiriya - is an apt symbol of this decisive national trait, one so critical that it helps explain another key reason for what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan: not just Buddhism, nor its early radical water technology, or even its singular island status – but its ability to, as Winston Churchill put it, “keep buggering on.” For the lion, grand and majestic though it is, is first and foremost resistant. Nothing defeats it. Never before the Moriyan kings had taken the throne had buggering on been such an imperative national trait. As the twenty-five monarchs of this third dynasty vacillated through their (usually brief) reigns, the state’s rulers became increasingly dependent on mercenaries to maintain control. The dynasty’s third king, Moggallana, made this something of a sine qua non when he overthrew his half-brother, King Kashyapa, with the help of mercenaries. He was not the first Anduraupuran king to do this: Ilanaga in 33 CE and Abhayanaga in 231 CE had done much the same. But in the Moriyan rule, mercenaries became a fixture, tipping power struggles one way and then another on many occasions before the dynasty was annihilated. The mercenaries’ royal employers – especially King Dathopatissa I and King Aggabodhi I - wooed their testosterone confederates with special privileges and kept them close - and did little to stop them from plundering what they were there to defend whenever they wished. Emboldened, they burnt the palaces and temples of two of the last kings, Dathopatissa and Kassapa II, and in the end appointed Haththadatha as their own puppet ruler, the last of the Moriyan kings. Many other dynasties were to follow the Moriyans, crowning new kings who owed their thrones in ever-greater measure to this equatorial version of the Praetorian Guard as they drifted ever further from the glory days of the early Anduraupuran kingdom. The island itself and the kingdom that dominated it were to be wasted by the great invasion of 993 CE that destroyed the Anduraupuran kingdom. And though an attempt was made to recreate it at Polonnaruwa, further Tamil invasions swept it aside. The Anduraupuran kings became gypsies in their own land, setting up peripatetic kingdoms in Yapallawa, Kurunegala, Kotte, Dambadeniya, Gampola, Sitawaka and finally Kandy, before giving way to three sets of colonists from Portugal, Holland, and the UK fixed more on controlling trade routes and revenue rather than enriching the island’s inherent religions, languages, laws, and customs. Much of this eroded the resilience and order of what remained from the earlier kings' time. As King George V’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester, sat on the dais at the majestic Assembly Hall at Independence Square in 1948 to open the county’s first independent parliament, he bestowed on Sri Lanka a silent and jumbled inheritance of layers of competing hierarchies and laws, few of which were effectively policed and most of which were focused on things antipathical to the country’s real interests. From 1948 onwards, government after government, movement after movement, tried to rebalance the scales, but the difficulties they faced were immense. Liberalism, nationalism, socialism, Leninism, federalism, capitalism, resurgent religiosity, industrialisation, nationalisation, privatisation: over eight decades, there was barely an “ism” or “ideology” that was not tried out for size, sometimes effectively, more disastrously. Nothing quite fitted to fill the void left long ago in centres of power by invasions and colonisation. Through almost 8 decades of modern independence, a hellish civil war, banditry, failed coup d'états, uprisings, pogroms, the acute politicisation of the civil service, politicians whose venality could win global Oscars, national bankruptcy, and even a tsunami - none of this has ultimately been able to stop the island from buggering on, regardless. More than a little bruised, perhaps, battered certainly, but still stubbornly and splendidly there. Through it all, the island held the inheritance of a way of life, bestowed on it from its earliest times, which enabled it to survive all this disorder. "We are not makers of history,” noted Martin Luther King. “We are made by history." And in this regard, Sri Lanka’s resilient social structure, celebrated by its lion emblem, is a factor worth noting – especially at this point in the country's history, as the Moriyans began a 236-year rule of such hooligan intemperance as to put the island’s elastic hardiness to the test. For this most regicidal of regicidal dynasties was to prove that they, not the country, were ultimately to be consigned to history. The country was to bounce right back with such suppleness and stamina as to leap more or less intact from even faraway distant Then to here-and-now, Now. _________________________________________________________________________________________ That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbirck at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.