Intriguingly, there was also a lot of ritual Buddhist paraphernalia, apparently smelted in Sumatra and intended for export: bronze Buddhist statuettes and masks representing Kala, the demon of time ceremonial spears, vessels, and bells and a haul of Buddhist ritual scepters called vajras, or “thunderbolts,” that were used by tantric monks as magical weapons and symbols of power.

There was even a ship’s compass-a new technological breakthrough at the time. The ship also appears to have been carrying carved ivory and wooden doors from Bengal to a temple in Southeast Asia. Load by load, the divers brought up Indian steel weapons and Bengali brass lion-head finials, bottles from Thailand, glass from the Middle East, and silver ingots from Tang China. There were bronze vanity mirrors of exactly the sort depicted in the sculpture galleries of the nearby Buddhist site Borobudur, where the sophisticated court women of Java are shown combing their hair and applying makeup, in present-day Indonesia. There were gold ring-weights used by jewelers to measure expensive raw materials, as well as the jewelers’ intricate creations themselves. There were fine Chinese ceramics, including costly white porcelain, and 20,000 Chinese stoneware pots. The finds were described by one of the excavators as “astounding.” In due course, the salvage divers brought to the surface all that survived of the vessel’s rich cargo. The crew and the cargo lay on the floor of the Java Sea undisturbed until 1997, when marine archaeologists located the wreck near the Intan oil field. Sometime in the early tenth century, a ninety-foot-long, three-hundred-ton trading ship sank off the coast of Java, probably the victim of a sudden monsoon storm.

‘Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan’ sandstone sculpture from Phnom Da, Cambodia, circa 600

William dalrymple the company quartet