The ancient predecessor of Kedah: an Indian-Ocean entrepôt centred on the Bujang Valley between Gunung Jerai and the Muda River, whose Sungai Batu complex has yielded furnace-and-jetty evidence of an iron-smelting export industry attested from at least the 6th century BC (Malaysian excavators claim 788 BC, a dating still debated). Over 180 sites — Hindu and Buddhist candi, wharves, administrative halls — mark its trade with India, China and West Asia, before the polity passed into the Islamic Kedah Sultanate traditionally dated to 1136.
Superseded by the Kedah Sultanate, whose traditional founding date is the 1136 conversion of the ruler to Islam — the canonical kedah_sultanate record picks up from that year.
The atlas holds 2 border frames for Old Kedah (Kedah Tua) — the shape you scrub through changes in 500 BC · 100.
The standard monograph on the early-historic Malay Peninsula, with extensive treatment of ancient Kedah and the Bujang Valley (Brill, Handbook of Oriental Studies; ISBN 9004119736).