The Bronze Age
Early Metal Age remains include such stray finds as clay utensils, stone mounds, and bells shaped like two bowls. The people who fashioned these items lived in villages and buried their dead in pottery jars or stone sarcophagi, complete with such funeral gifts as arm and foot rings, beads, highly polished stone tools, and bronze and iron implements and ornaments. The metal objects relate strongly to the Bronze Age designs of the Dongson culture of Indochina. See specimens at the Bali Museum in Denpasar and at Lembaga Purbakala in Pejeng.
     The Moon of Pejeng, a deep-rimmed, hourglass-shaped kettle-gong—misnamed a "drum"—is one of the most remarkable archaeological artifacts discovered in Bali and a masterpiece of the Balinese Bronze Age. The gong hangs in a roofed shrine in the most sacred courtyard of the old imperial temple of Pura Panataran Sasih in Pejeng. The gong resembles other Dongson culture gong designs found throughout Indochina, Indonesia, Nusatenggara, and as far east as the Kai Islands of Maluku. But the Balinese gong of Pejeng, nearly 187 cm long with a sounding surface 160 cm in diameter, is the largest of its kind. The Balinese consider the object charged with awesome magical power; some say it's an earplug of the moon goddess Ratih.
     By the Bronze Age, Bali's population practiced both wet- and dry-rice cultivation, worked the fields with stone tools and water buffalo, raised pigs and poultry, and developed a sophisticated megalithic culture which made use of menhirs, stone chairs, and stepped pyramids. Village meetings took place around large stone seats taken from riverbeds; these seats are the precursors of today's meeting pavilions (bale agung). When the island became Indianized in later centuries, the menhirs hewn to memorialize dead ancestors eventually evolved into Hinduistic stone portrait statues. It's believed the Balinese cili motif, representing the rice goddess Dewi Sri, may have originated from a fertility cult existing during Bali's Bronze Age.
 

BALINESE MEGALITHIC SARCOPHAGI    Denpasar's Bali Museum houses a collection of historic and cultural objects, some dating back to the Neolithic (2600-600 B.C.) and Megalithic (300 B.C.) periods. The sarcophagus above dates from 200 B.C. Some sarcophagi contained skele-tons in the squatting position. The diagram here shows how corpses were fitted into the tight space. Another broader, longer type contained full-length skeletons. All types, hewn from single blocks of stone, were decorated with hideous or comic knobs or engraved facial features. The 53 separate sarcophagi found at 37 different sites around Bali were for prominent community mem-bers. When an intact sarcophagus was discov-ered in recent years at Puyangan in south-central Bali, the villagers had to perform the act of burning it since there is no rest for the dead without a cremation.

Early Indic Influences
The Hindu religion and culture was brought to Indonesia about 2,000 years ago, probably by Indian traders from Gujerati who were attracted to the islands by their riches in gold, spices, and sandalwood. Inscriptions in Indian script from the 5th century A.D. reveal Indianized kingdoms then extant in West Java and East Borneo. By the 7th century A.D., 1,000 students were studying Buddhist and Shivaite teachings in what was then the Sumatran Hindu empire of Sriwijaya, from where priests and monks could have spread their teachings to Bali, probably at the invitation of local princes.
Remnants of ancient hermitages and monasteries can be seen today at Gunung Kawi and Goa Gadjah, both in Gianyar. Holy men trained here empowered and consecrated Balinese princes by bestowing upon them the status of god-kings and giving them a place in the Indic family tree. Balinese script is derived from the Palava script of South India.