Scholars usually place the Angkorean period of Cambodian history between A.D 802 and 1431 .in fact, these years mark neither a beginning nor an end. The northwestern part of Cambodia ,where the state we know as Angkor (The name derives from the Sanskrit work Nagara ,meaning "City". sprang up in ninth century,had been inhabited by Khmer speaking people for several hundred years.
Moreover,although the city was abandoned in fifteenth century,it was restored as a royal briefly in the 1570s,more important,one of its major temple,Angkor Wat,(ie the city temple)was probably never abandoned by the Khmer,for it contains Buddhist statuary from every century between the fifteenth and the nineteenth and inscriptions on its walls from as late as 1747, when the Angkor complex was Discovered, by French missionaries and explorers in 1850s Angkor Wat contained a prosperous Buddhist monastery inside its,walls,tended by more than a thousand hereditary slaves.
The two dates are useful all the same, for they mark off Cambodia's period of Greatness.at various time in these six hundred years,and only then,Cambodia -known in its own inscriptions as Kambuja-Desa-was the mightiest Kingdom in Southeast Asia,drawing,visitors and tribute from as far a way as present-day Burma and Malaysia as well as from what were later to be Thai Kingdom to the West.
Sources for Angkorean History At the same time,these periods of systematic domination were infrequent and relatively short. We know too little about social conditions at this time,moreover,to classify all Cambodia King as" Oriental Despots" some of them,as far as we can tell ,accomplished little or nothing, other left scores of inscriptions .Temple.Statues,and public works, some Kings ruled a centralized, many-layered administration, other,seem to have controlled only a few hundred followers,one fact that emerges from studying the Kings in order -as L,P Briggs and George have done -is the variety of people and regions they were able to command, seen from the top,where written records emerge, the Angkorea period is easy to generalize about but hard to penetrate ,seen in terms of artistic styles media,and motif- including the facility of Cambodia Poets in Sanskrit- it is possible to talk about "progress"
development, and decline" without being able to say why some periods were "progressive" and other decadent seen from the bottom,it is easy to generalize again about continuity between the era and recent time,but we are handicapped by the poverty of our source.
Sources, indeed,pose major problem, those connected with Sanskrit inscriptions on the one hand and Khmer-Language one on the other have been discussed in ( Government & Society) ,but it is important to see how the biases of these document produce a skewed picture of Cambodian Society at Angkor ,the Sanskrit Poems proclaim the grandeur of Kings ,the Khmer inscriptions exhibit the precision with jurisdictional squabble were prosecuted and slaves register,here and there we can use inscriptions to cross-reference official careers, here here and there especially when they provide inventories of Temple treasures and personnel- they give us a glimpse of material culture,but it is as if U S history had to be reconstructed from obituary notices,wills.deeds,and fourth of July orations and little else.
These kinds of document,of course,are meticulously dated, this means that,with some exceptions,the chronological framework of Angkor particularly for the monarchs who Reigned there has been reconstructed after having been forgotten by the Cambodians themselves .the job of chronological reconstructed was never easy,it occupied much of the career of perhaps the greatest scholar associated with early Southeast Asia history ,the French savant George(1886-1968).Coed es was unwilling to speculate about matter not dealt with by inscriptions and left his successors with a variety of tasks concerning the corpus of Cambodian inscriptions he established.
The inscriptions themselves,being date,are rooted in time being parts of permanent buildings they are rooted in landscape too,in spite of this,with rare exceptions,the inscriptions are not the place to look for details of life among Cambodia's rural poor,or for clear statements of the political process as it operated at Angkor,instead,they usually refer to extraordinary events contracts entered into by the people and Gods observed from "above"in Poetry or from"Below"in pose the history they give us is comparable,in a way,to the lighting and extinction of hundreds of torches,here and there ,now and then over landscape of Eastern main land Southeast Asia.As each this lighted ,we can look around and discern a few details of historical fact,Temple X was dedicated to such and such an Indian God,by so and so on such as and by a date,it had a particular number of slaves attached to it,identified by name and sex,and with children identified in term of where they could walk or not,the Temple lands stretched East to a stream,South to a small hill,West and North to other land marks, and then the light goes out,we know little about the way this Temple fitted into the context of its time,whether its patrons enjoyed official status,or whether the temple remain in use for months or centuries in some inscriptions.descendants return to the site to restore it in honor of their ancestor, other temples seem to have lasted only as long as individual patrons did .
The other sources we have for the study of Cambodian history are the Temples themselves,and the statues and bas-reliefs they contain, as well as artifacts dating from Angkorean times that have been unearthed throughout Cambodia. These tell us a good deal about the sequences and priorities of Cambodia elite religion,about the popularity of certain Indian Myths,and about way in which they reflect the preoccupations of the elite, they also tell us about Fashions in Herlines,Hairstyles,and Jewelry,these have been used to arrange a chronology of Artistic Styles, and bas-reliefs are information about Weapons,Armor,and Battle Tactic,and those from the thirteenth century temple-mountain,the Bayon ,are arich source for details about everyday Cambodia life.
So in addition to deeds obituary notices,and orations,we can work with tableaux showing the people of Angkor,for the most Part disguised as mythical figures and with bas-reliefs showing them going about their daily business, what is missing from our source are documents that stand above the others, giving an overall view of the Societ,or those that in a sense come from "Underneath"it,providing details about such things as Taxes,Land Ownership,Life stories.and folf beliefs .
End of Kingship & Society of Angkor.
