Kingdom of Namayan

Namayan, also called Sapa or Lamayan, was an independent polity on the banks of the Pasig River in the Philippines, made up of several barangays. It is usually described as having peaked between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, although it remained inhabited until the Spanish conquest in 1571. Its political centres were at Namayan in present-day Mandaluyong and at Sapa, now Santa Ana in Manila, where the Franciscans built a church in 1578. Archaeology at Santa Ana has produced the oldest evidence of continuous habitation among the Pasig River polities, older than the remains at Maynila and Tondo. Excavations in the 1960s uncovered a pre-Hispanic cemetery with ceramics that show trade with China and Southeast Asia in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. Namayan was one of several riverine polities, alongside Tondo, Maynila and Cainta, that the Spanish found when they arrived. Its ruling house claimed descent from Lakantagkan, and its territory was absorbed into the Spanish colonial system after 1571.