This myth of origin was first recorded by chinese officials, and in dead ,for the first few centuries of the Christian era, written sources for Cambodia history are almost entirely Chinese,these are supplemented by archaeological finding,especially from the remains of an ancient trading city near the modern vietnamese village of OC EO the Mekong Delta ,excavated during World War II by an archaeological team supervised by Louis Malleret.
Roman coins found at the site date from the second and third centuries AD ,and some Indian artifacts ,including seal and jewelry ,can be dated to the same period, Malleret believed that port declined importance in to the fourth century, no contemporary records about it have survived, how ever,and we do not know what it was called by its inhabitants,because of its location,and some of the artifacts found at the site,Malleret concluded that the port was used by pilgrims and traders,moving between China and Indian in the first century of the Christian era, its extent suggests that it played an important part in the trade,and its location was ideal for ships hugging the coast and "Turning the corner" from or into the southeast China sea. the city probably provided warehousing for goods in the transit between India and China had was an outlet for products collected from the forested interior of Cambodia and Vietnam.
Until the twentieth century,forest products made up the bulk of Cambodia's export trade these included elephants,ivory ,rhinoceros horn feather, wild spices like cardamom, and other products such as lacquer ,hides and aromatic wood ,plantation exports also, which made up the bulk of twentieth century Cambodia foreign trade,were of little use in early time,when nearly everyone in the region produced enough themselves the point to make about these high-value ,low-bulk goods is that they were cultivated or caught by forest people rather than by inhabitants of cities,many of them probably traveled considerable distances before they reached Oc- Eo , and so did the goods or coins traders used to pay for them.Oc-Eo then may well have been the principal gateway through which Indianization extended into the Indianized Kingdom of Champa, which developed in the early Christian era along the south-central coast of vietnam.
Until very recently many scholars believed that Oc-Eo was the the seaport for an important Kingdom,identified by China sources as "Funan" and located by George Coedes (Using linguistic evidence rather than archaeological findings) near the small hillock known as Ba- phnom ,in southeastern Cambodia, east of the mekong.According to Coedes,Funan.derives from the old Khmer word for the Mountain (Bnam) and he located the ritual center of the Kingdom at Ba-Phnom.A cult to Siva as a mountain deity existed in Cambodia as the fifth century AD, and may well have been enacted on Ba-Phnom, an Indian traveler to China reported , It is the custom of the country to worship the celestial god Mahesvara [Siva]. this deity regularly descends on Mt Mo -Tam , so that the climate is constantly mild and herbs and trees do not wither..
Paul Wheatley has suggested that the cult originated in southern India and that the mountain was not Ba-Phnom .but another hillock not far away, in what is now vietnam. the evidence that either mountain was a cult site is stronger than the evidence that Funan was a major ,unified Kingdom. what made the place important to the Chinese was that a principality of this name(or more likely, on dabbed Funan by Chinese offered tribute to Chinese emperor on an irregular basis, between AD 253 and 519.
Toward the end of this period, stone inscriptions evidence for a major Kingdom. It is possible ,nonetheless, that small chiefdom in Cambodia occasionally banded together and called themselves a Kingdom,for the purposes of sending tributary goods to China (an ideal occasion for encouraging trade) or of seeking Chinese help against their neighbours, it is possible that Funan was thought to be a major Kingdom because the Chinese want it to be one and later because French scholars were eager to find a predecessor for the highly centralized Kingdom of Angkor,which developed in the ninth century AD,.
Despite their usefulness in many ways,Chinese sources present peculiar problems to the historian ,as many of them uncritically repeat data from previous compilations as if they were still true.Nonetheless, Chinese description are often as this about 'Funan"
The King's dwelling has a double terrace on it,palisades take the place of walls in fortified place, the houses are covered with the leaves of plan which grows on the edge of the sea,these leaves are six to seven feet long,and take the form of fish, the King rides mounted on an elephant, his subjects ugly and black, their hair is frizzy, they wear neither clothing nor shoe for living. for living they cultivate the soil,they sow one year,and reap for three, these barbarians are not without their own history books they even have archives for their text.
These is evidence that the major step during the Funan period toward the integration of the small.dry-rice-growing and root- cultivating principalities,whose people worshipped Siva, with hunting and gathering societies inland from Oc Eo was the introduction,perhaps as late as A,D 500, of systematic irrigation, drainage probably came earlier ,we have seen in the Kaundinya
myth that drainage was attributed to the good office of dragon-King one of few inscription from Funan mentions a King Rescuing his territory from the mud,but the most important passage relates to this innovation,and to Indianization,is a Chinese one ,which appears as first to be garbled version of the original myth.
Then the Kingdom was ruled by a Brahman name Kauninya , a spirit announced to him that he would be called upon to govern Funan so he travelled there ,,,and the people of Funan came out to meet him, and proclaimed him King,he changed the institutions to fellow Indian Models ,he wanted his subjects to stop digging wells, and to dig reservoirs in the future,several dozen families could then unite and use one of these in common,,
Now seventh and eighth century inscriptions speak of rice fields adjacent to Hindu temples,suggestive of irrigated rice,and aerial photographs of the mekong Delta show silted-over canals, which may have been used for drainage as well as transport if irrigation was widely used before the ninth century A,D it was not on an especially large scale and ,with the exception of the seventh century agglomeration of Isanapura ( now know as Sambor Prei KuK ),near Kompong thom ) the village was the most characteristic unit pre-Angkorean Cambodia.Indeed, Isanapura may well have consisted of village grouped around a common ritual center,whose stone building have survived even after the introduction of wet-rice technology ,perhaps in the fourth or fifth century A,D the area under irrigation, which is to say, under control of supra-village organization was never great,moreover,it seems likely that most villagers in the hinterland continued to grow dry rice and to cultivated roots,supplementing their diet by hunting and gathering ,long after irrigation and wet-rice cultivation had broken hold in Hinduized communities,.
People,rather than land per se, are needed to cultivate wet rice. with this fact in mind, as well as low density of the population in the entire area (always excepting Java,Bali, and the Red River delta in Vietnam) it is easy to see why throughout Southeast Asian history overlordship and power were so often thought of and pursued in terms of controlling people rather than land, there were periods of Cambodian history, under Jayavarman VII was the twelfth century,for example ,when far-flung territorial control was an important part of King's prestige, nonetheless ,territorial per se,(mere forest in most cases) was never as important as People.
Indeed, the notion of a lienable ownership of land,as distinct from land used ,does not seem to have developed in traditional Cambodia ,land left fallow for three the lord of all the land in the Kingdom.which mean that he could reward people with the right to use it,many of the Cambodian -language inscriptions from the Angkorean period, as shall see.dealt with complicates quarrels about access to land resources .The record of inscriptions and, by inference,of architectural remains from the first eight centuries A,D fail to provide evidence of large-scale unified Kingdoms on Cambodia soil and very little evidence of the development of urban centers,there seem to have been some continuity among members of the elite,traceable in part to their tendency to marry among themselves ,at the same time,it seem likely that Cambodia, like much of the rest of early Southeast Asia,contained a collection of small state ,each equipped with a court and an elite, and these segments had entourages ,or "Strengths" of people growing food for them who could also be called upon to fight.presumably,these states traded among themselves and raided each other.particularly
for slaves, it seems like also that each King, when undisturbed (or when disturbing others) thought of himself as a universal monarch, benefiting from Indian teacher, as well as a local chieftain, performing,identifiable Cambodia tasks,
Leadership was measured by powers,which was measured by success in battle, by the ability to attract a large
following, and by the perceived capacity to provide protection.as JDM derrett has pointed out protection, is the sine qua non of peasant society, protection from enimies ,from rival overlords ,frome the forces of nature in recognition of this necessity, overlords in the time of Funan and throughout Cambodia history often included in their reign-name the suffix Varman(originally~armor,hence,protection.
The overlords themselves thought that they could not live without supernatural protection, and most of them sought this ,in part,through their devotion to Siva, here they were assisted ,for a time at lease,by a group of India Brahman ,the so-called Pasuputa, who enjoyed a vogue in India and elsewhere in Southeast Asia around the fifth and sixth century A,D,there wandering ascetics preached that personal devotions to Silva were more rewarding than meticulous attention to Brahmanical rituals or to the law of destiny,or Karma,technically,an overlord's devotion did not require the intercession of the Pasuputa ,and some of them presumably did without it,in any case these self - made Hindus were perceived ,and saw themselves,as superior men, vehicles of Silva, the God who"Ceaselessly descended" onto the Holy mountain,the transmission of Silva's potency via the overlord and his ritual acts to the people and the soil was an important source of cohesiveness in Cambodia society.It has also been a source of continuity,as late as 1877,human sacrifies to a concort of Silva were conducted at Ba-Phnom ,at the beginning of Argicaltural year,like those desrcibed in fifth century Chinese source, these had the objective of transmitting fertility to the region, and like the Chinese rituals, they were sponsored by local officals,.
In the Funan era,Buddhism also flourished in Cambodia, and the Buddhist concept of merit .which until very recently suffused Cambodian thinking about society, resembles,in some ways, the notion of prowess and salvation just discussed ,in both schemes of thought ,power and ability were seen-especially by those who did not have them as rewards for virtuous behavior in previous lives, the loss,diminution or absence of power, moreover,revealed to people that a previous existence had been in some way flawed ,a person's status in society,therefore,was programmed by performance in the past, and one's behavior here and now determined where one would stand when one returned to life, to improve personal status,then,one could accumulate merit by performing virtuous act,like subsidizing a temple or being generous to the Monks, donating a gilded image of God, or financing religious festivals. acts like these were thought to redeem the person sponsoring them, as we shall see, the great temple at Angkor were also thought of as redemptive gestures of this kind, a bargain struck by Kings with their immediate ancestors and,through them,with the Gods ,no one here and now could see if the bargains were a success ,but the thought of neglecting to made them, especially when the afterlife meant a return to earth, occurred seldom,if at all..
The notions of " Patron" Client, and entourage become important during later stages of Cambodian history they are useful keys to nineteenth century Cambodian life but it would be dangerous to assume that precisely similar arrangements were in effect in Cambodia in the sixth and seventh centuries A,D we do not know how overlords came to power,for example, or how they recruited followers ,we do not know what made followers linger in their services,or what entailed ,the evidence suggests that we can describe pre-Angkorean society in Cambodia as an aggregation of Leader and followers,occupying spaces of territory and spaces in society that were through about in terms of centers and peripheries,corresponding to Indian concept of segments of what we call "Society" (i e the total of the aggregations) acted independently of each other or were related in sporadic ways. things were not quite as simple,however .Localized religious Cult, like Eveline Ma and other examined in Cambodia in the 1940s and 1950s ,generally stressed the welfare of the communities rather than that of individual, for without communities to perform the work,irrigated rice can not be grown,Rural life requires alliances,the human sacrifices at Ba-Phnom were on example of this communal orientation, other included the complex of rituals ushering in the agricultural year (the sacred-furrow, the towers of sand,and so forth) the royal cults that in effect negotiate with the dead for the welfare of Kingdom,and the boat race that place in flooded rivers at the end of planting,although these cults at first appear to be antagonistic to each other (The great and Little Traditions once again) in fact they were complementary.
Because genealogies were not maintained in Cambodia,except among elite, the Nak ta ,or ancestor people,had no family names ,they thus became the symbolic ancestor of people in particular place,or by dying in place they came to patronize its soil Nak Ta in inhabited sites could be spoken to and tamed ,those in the forest or in abandoned places were thought to be more powerful and more malignant ,as a place was inhabited ,over the years ancestral traditions gathered a round it, although seldom to the same extent as in China or Vietnam,the Pre- Ang korean record in almost silent about Nak Ta but we can assert,by reading back from modern Dalta ,that a confrontation between Hindu and local beliefs was rarer than a blending of the two ,the tendency to syncretize,in fact,was noted by early Chinese Visitors, the passage that refers to Silva's continuous descent onto Mt Mo tan for example,also mentions a Bodhisattva, or Buddha -to-be ,that was held in reverence at the time occasionally, two Indian Gods blended with each other .as Silva did with Vishnu to form Harihara, a composite deity much favored by Ang korean Kings.
The process of blending different religions meant that here and there local spirits received the names of Indian Gods, just as localized Greek and Roman deities were renamed in the early years of Christianity .Hindu temples also were often built near sites favored by pre-Indian celebrations,there are Neolithic remains underneath the Palace at Angkor.What was being stressed at time like this was the continuity of habitation and a continuity of sacredness ideas in themselves with deeper roots in Cambodia than in the most of India,if ancestors became India Gods in time of centralization and prosperity ,the Gods became ancestors again when the rationale for Hinduism and its priestly supporters disappeared, thus at Angkor,and in Cham sites in Vietnam studied in the 1930s by Paul Mus ,Indian images and temples were worshiped in quite recent time merely as mysterious products of Nak Ta, this is partly because the literature of Cham and Cambodian elites,which was used to explain and justify the images and the temple,had disappeared or could not longer be deciphered ,while the language village people used in their religious lives remained to large extent unchanged from the pre Indian era to colonial times.
the most enduring cult, as Mus has shown,was the cult of the lingam,or stone phallus,this widely diffused motif ,and the cult associated with it,exemplified links between ancestor spirits ,the soil where they and the lingam"Grew",and the fertility of nearby soil for agricultural use,became of the territorial aspect of the cult (a lingam could be moved from place to place,ceremoniously but was only potent in one place at the time) and the notion that the lingam was a patron of a community,it was closely supervised by local overlords and,in the Angkorean era ,by the King,as early as the fifth century A,D a cult honoring a mountain God at the hill of Lingaparvata in Southern Lao,nowadays known as Wat-Phu, involved human sacrifices, the site was notable because it contained an enormous nature lingam,some 18 metres (59 feet) high, Lingapavata,like Ba-Phnom ,was patronized as an "ancestral" site by several Angkorean King.
The period of Funan, then which lasted until the sixth century A,D was one in which Cambodia's political center of gravity was located south and East of the present-day,Phnom-penh ,during this period,trade between India and China was intense ,and one of the principal components of this trade was Buddhist religious objects, local religious practices emphasized devotion to Siva Vishnu,and the Buddha as well as to minor Hindu deities ,politics centered on village and groups of villages.rather than on a tightly organized Kingdom,irrigated rice allowed for surpluses and some local differentiation ,but not as much as developed later on. the main point to stress about the period,from the historian's point of view.is that we know about it from Chinese source,which tell about local customs,centralization,and commodities for trade.we haer no Cambodia voices,as we do from seventh century onward in the form of stone inscription,after the waning of "Funan" in fact. our source become richer and harder to use..
The -End of "Funan" Chapter,
