Leadership in Burma, after a period of domination by the Tibetan Pyu tribes, has passed to the Bamar, or Burmese, whose king Anawratha unites the region in 1044.
Anawratha establishes his capital at Pagan and accepts Theravada Buddhism.
The Burmese chronicles claim the Burmans founded the fortified city of Pagan (Bagan) in 849 but the oldest radiocarbon dated evidence at Pagan (old walls) points to 980 CE while the main walls point to circa 1020 CE, just twenty-four years earlier than the beginning of the reign of Anawrahta, the founder of Pagan Empire.
In any case, the Burmans had overtaken the leadership of the Pyu realm by the late tenth century, and go on to found the Pagan Empire in the middle of the eleventh century, unifying the Irrawaddy valley and its periphery for the first time.
Nonetheless, the Pyu have left an indelible mark on Pagan whose Burman rulers will incorporate the histories and legends of the Pyu as their own.
The Burman kings of Pagan will claim descent from the kings of Sri Ksetra and Tagaung as far back as 850 BCE—a claim dismissed by most modern scholars.
Pyu settlements will emain in Upper Burma for the next three centuries but the Pyu will be gradually absorbed and assimilated into the expanding Pagan Empire.
The Pyu language will exist until the late twelfth century but by the thirteenth century, the Pyu will have assumed the Burman ethnicity and disappear into history.
In the beginning of his reign, Anawrahta's principality is a small area—barely two hundred miles north to south and about eighty miles from east to west, comprising roughly the present districts of Mandalay, Meiktila, Myingyan, Kyaukse, Yamethin, Magwe, Sagaing and Katha east of the Irrawaddy, and the riverine portions of Minbu and Pakkoku.
To the north lies the Bai Kingdom of Dali, to the east are the still largely uninhibited Shan Hills, to the south and the west the Pyus, and farther south still, the Mons.
