In the formation of these prodigious tanks, the labour chiefly employed was that of the aboriginal inhabitants, the Yakkhos and Nagas, directed by the science and skill of the conquerors. Their contributions of this kind, though in the instance of the Buddhist converts they may have been to some extent voluntary, were, in general, the result of compulsion.[1] Like the Israelites under the Egyptians, the aborigines were compelled to make bricks[2] for the stupendous dagobas erected by their masters[3]; and eight hundred years after the subjugation of the island, the Rajavali describes vast reservoirs and appliances for irrigation, as being constructed by the forced labour of the
B.C. 104.Yakkhos[4] under the superintendence of Brahman engineers.[5] This, to some extent, accounts for the prodigious amount of labour bestowed on these structures; labour which the whole revenue of the kingdom would not have sufficed to purchase, had it not been otherwise procurable.
1: In some instances the soldiers of the king were employed in forming works of irrigation.
2: Mahawanso, ch. xxxviii.
3: Ibid., ch. xxvii.
4: Rajavali, p. 237, 238. Exceptions to the extortion of forced labour for public works took place under the more pious kings, who made a merit of paying the workmen employed in the erection of dagobas and other religious monuments.—Mahawanso, ch, xxxv.
5: Maharwanso, ch. x.
Under this system, the fate of the aborigines was that usually consequent on the subjugation of an inferior race by one more highly civilised. The process of their absorption into the dominant race was slow, and for centuries they continued to exist distinct, as a subjugated people. So firmly rooted amongst them was the worship both of demons and serpents, that, notwithstanding the ascendency of Buddhism, many centuries elapsed before it was ostensibly abandoned; from time to time, "demon offerings" were made from the royal treasury[1]; and one of the kings, in his enlarged liberality, ordered that for every ten villages there should be maintained an astrologer and a "devil-dancer," in addition to the doctor and the priest.[2]
1: Mahawanso, ch. x.; TURNOUR'S Epitome. p. 23.
2: TURNOUR'S Epitome, p. 27; Rajaratnacari, ch. ii.; Rajavali, p. 241.