Cambodia in the Fifteenth & Sixteenth Century.

The narrative history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, about which we know so little, can be disposed of fairy quickly,tha Thai-oriented administration of the Angkor region,it seems,was overthrown by forces loyal to Phnompenh toward the middle of the fifteenth century, that is, about twenty years after the last Thai attack on the old capital, once the Thai were removed from the scene at Angkor,however,neither they nor the Cambodians sought to administer the area for more than a hundred years, during this period, a succession of Kings, whose names and dates reported in the chronicles are probably fictional, held power in Phnompenh.
By the end of fifteenth century, the chronicles suggest, conflict had developed between these new rulers, as they renewed and formalized their relations with Ayadhya and with officials or chieftains with following n rooted in the Southeastern Sruk or districts, some of these forces, the chronicles state, were led by a former slave,Europeans writing some what later stated that this new King was in fact a relative of the monarch whom he had disposed, what is important for later events is that the disposed King,Chan, took,temporary refuge in Ayudhya before returning with an army to dispose the usurper,   his restoration under Thai patronages set a precedent that many Cambodian King were to follow, as did the fact that he was disposed by forces coming from Eastern portions of the Kingdom.
From the 1620s onward, these regions of dissidence could often rely on Vietnamese support, a Cambodian King married a Vietnamese princess in the 1630s, and as a bride-price ,allowed Vietnamese authorities to set up customs post in the Mekong Delta, than inhabited largely by Khmer but beyond the reach of Cambodian administrative control, over next two hundred years,Vietnamese immigrants poured into the region, still known to many Khmer today as "Lower Cambodia" or Kampuchea-Krom, by the twentieth century, only four hundred thousand Cambodians remained in Southern Vietnam, surrounded by more than ten times as many Vietnamese,they developed a distinctive culture, and many twentieth century, Cambodian political leader including Son Sen,Ieng sary,and Son ngoc Thanh were born and raised as  members of this minority,the presence of rival patrons to the West and East set in motion a whipsaw between Thai and Vietnamese influence over Cambodia, and between pro-Thai and pro-Vietnamese Cambodian factions at the court,this conflict lasted until the 1860s, and revived in different from after the communist victory in Vietman 1975.
The first European to write in detail about Cambodia was "Tome Pires, who Suma Oriental was written between 1512 and 1515, the Kingdom is described as a warlike one, whose ruler "Obeys no one" and Pires hinted at the richness of the products that could be obtained from it, he was relying,however,on hearsay,the first eyewitness account comes to us from the Portuguese missionary Gaspar Da Cruz,who visited Lovek toward the end of King Chan's Reign in 1556,he left after about a year,disappointed by his inability to make converts,and chose to blame the superstitions of people and their loyalty to Buddhist Monks .Da cuz was impressed,indeed,by the solidarity of the Cambodians,and in a interesting passage he remarked they :

 Dare do nothing of themselves, nor accept anything new without leave of the King,which is why Christians cannot be made without the King's approval ,and if some of my readers should say that they could be converted without the King knowing it, to this I answer that the people of the country is of such a nature, that nothing is done that the King kneweth wherefore everyone seeketh news to carry unto him, to have an occasion for to speak with him,whereby without the King's good will nothing can be done.

He suggested that the Sangha contained more than a third of the able bodied men in Cambodia or, by his estimate, some hundred thousand-a fact with clear implications for politics and economy.these monks commanded great loyalty from the population, and Da Cruz found them to be :

"Exceedingly proud and vain... alive they are worshipped for Gods, in sort that the interior among them do worship the superior like Gods, praying unto them and prostrating themselves before them, and so the common people have great confidence in them, with a great reverence and worship,so that there is no person that dare contradict them in anything,,,[It] happened sometimes that while I was preaching,many round the hearing me very well,and being very satisfied with what I told them,that if there come along any of these priests and said, This is good ,but ours is better, they would all depart leave me alone "

The absence of inherited riches cited by Da Cruz provides an example of Royal interference in everyday life,when the owner of a house died, Da Cruz remarked.all that is in it returners to the King, and the wife, and children hide what they can, and begin to seek a new life, possessions, in other words,were held by people at the King's pleasure, as were ranks,land and positions in society,this residual absolute power,it seems, gave the otherwise rickety institution of the monarchy great strength Vis a' vis elite ,one consequence of the arrangements cited by Da Cruz was that rich families
could not in theory at least, consolidate themselves into lasting anti monarchical alliances ,the King's response to them (dispossessing a generation at a time) suggest that Kings distrusted the elite.
Da Cruz said nothing about Angkor, although a later Portuguese writer Diego Do Couto reported in 1599 that some forty years before hand (in 1550 or 1551) a King of Cambodia had stumbled across the ruins while on an elephant hunt, the story is not confirmed by other sources, but date inscriptions at Angkor reappear in the 1560s.suggesting that the date of the rediscovery may be accurate, although it may have taken place during a military campaign instead of during a hunt, for the Angkor region was a logical staging area for Cambodian armies poised to invade Siam.
Do Couto wrote that when the King had been informed of the existence of ruins.

He went to the place, and seeing extent and the height of the exterior walls , wanting to examine the interior as well ,he ordered people then and there to cut and burn the undergrowth, and he remained there, beside a pretty river while this work was accomplished, by five or six thousand men, working for a few days ,,and when everything had been carefully cleaned up, the King went inside, and,,was filled with admiration for the extent of these constructions.'

He added that the King then decided to transfer his court to Angkor. if he ever did so , in fact , it was probably for only a brief period, for his sojourn is not mentioned in Thai or Cambodian chronicle, two in inscriptions from Angkor-Wat. moreover indicate that the temple was partially restored under Royal patronage in 1577- 1578,both of these , and two more incised at Phnom-Bakeng in 1583,
honored the King's young son, in whose favor he was to abdicate in 1584, possibly to delay a coup by his own ambitions, in fact , may refer to this infighting by expressing the hope that the King would no longer be tormented by "Royal enemies "It is equally possible, however, that the phrase refers to the Thai Royal family , with whom the Cambodian elite had been quarrelling throughout the 1570s.
Indeed, in spite of the apparent ideological solidarity noted by Da Cruz, the period 1560- 1590 was a turbulent one in which Cambodian troops took advantage of Thai weakness (Brought on in part by the Burmese sacking of Ayudhya in 1569) to attack Thai territory several times,according to Europeans , the Cambodian King, worried by internal and external threats, changed his attitude toward Catholic missionaries,  allowing them to preach and sending gifts of rice to the recently colonized centers of Malacca and Manila in exchange for promises of military help ( which never in fact arrived) early, the King had apparently attempted to seek an alliance or at least a nonaggression ការមិនឈ្លានពានគ្នា pact, with The Thai.

The flurry of contradictory activities in the field of foreign relations suggests instability at the court that is reflected in the frequent moves the King made, his premature abdication, and his unwillingness or inability to remain at peace with the Thai, who regained strength in the 1580s, and unsuccessfully laid siege to Lovek in 1587, a date confirmed by an inscription from Southeastern Cambodia, If subsequent Cambodian diplomatic maneuvering is a guide, it seems likely that these sixteenth century moves were attempts by the King to remain power despite the existence of heavily armed, more popular relatives and in the face of threats from Ayudhya and the surprisingly powerful Lao state to the North.
By 1593. Thai preparations for a new campaign against Lonvek forced the King to look overseas for help, he appealed to the Spanish governor-general of the Philippines, even promising to convert to Christianity if sufficient aid were forthcoming, before his letter had been acted on, however, the King and his young son fled North to Southern Laos, and another son was placed in change of the defense of Lonvek . the city fell in 1594.
Although Cambodian military forces were often as strong as those of the Thai throughout most of the seventeenth century and although,  as we shall see ,European traders were often attacked to Cambodia almost as strongly as they were to Ayudhya, Thai and Cambodian historiography and Cambodian legend interpret the capture of Lonvek as a turning point in Cambodian history.ushering in centuries of Cambodian weakness and Thai hegemony អនុត្តរភាព. the face of case as they appear in European source are more nuanced than this , but the belief is strong on both sides of the poorly demarcated border that a traumatic event ( for the Cambodians)had been taken place.

The popular legend of Preah-Ko Preah-Keo, first published by a French scholar in 1860s, is helpful on this point and is worth examining in detail, according to the legend, the citadel of Lonvek was so large that no horse could gallop around it, inside were two statues ,Preah-Ko ("Sacred-Cow") and Preah-Keo ("Sacred precious Stone") inside the bellies of these statues "There were Sacred books,in

gold,where one could learn formulae, and books where one could learn about anything in the world..now the King of Siam wanted to have the statues, so he raised an army and came to fight the

Cambodian King.

 

The legend then relates an incident contained in the chronicles as well ,Thai cannon fired silver coins, rather than shells, in to the bamboo hedges that served as Lonvek's fortifications , when Thai retreaded, the Cambodians cut down the hedges to get at the coins and thus had no defences when the Thai returned in the following year to assault the City ,when they had won, the Thai carried off the statues to Siam, after opening up their bellies ,the legend tells us,
They were able to take the the books which were hidden there and study their contents ,for this reason(emphasis added) they have become superior in knowledge to the Cambodians, and for this reason the Cambodians are ignorant, and lack people to do what is necessary, unlike other countries.

Although keyed to the capture of Lonvek, the legend may in fact be related to the long term collapse of Angkor ( in so far as this could be "remembered ") and perhaps to the relationships that had developed between Siam and Cambodia by the nineteenth century, when the legend emerged in the historical record, the temptation to prefer the earlier collapse as the source for the legend may spring from the fit between the legend's metaphors and what we know to have happened -ie. the slow transferal of Cambodia's regalia ,documents,customs, and learned men from Angkor to Ayudhya in the period between Jayavarman VII's  death and the Thai invasion of 1431, the statues of Preah-Ko is a metaphor for Cambodia's Indian heritage, the less precisely described Preah-Keo .seems to be a metaphor for Buddhist legitimacy, embodied by a Buddha image like the one taken from Vientiane by the Thai in the 1820s (and known as a Preah-Keo) to be enshrined in the Temple of that name in Bangkok, the see page of literary skill from Cambodia to Siam, and increasing  power of the Thai from the seventeenth century onward. are ingredients in the legend,which, like that of the leper King discussed in Chapter 4, may contain a collective memory of real occurrences half hidden by a metaphorical frame of reference, the myth ,in other words, may have been used by many Cambodians to explain Cambodia's weakness Vis-a'-vis the Thai in terms of its un-meritorious behavior( chasing after the coins) and its former strength in terms of Palladio that could be taken away.
The last five years of the sixteenth century are well documented in European source, these years were marked by Spanish imperialism in Cambodian, directed from the Philippines and orchestrated largely by two adventurers named Blas-Ruiz and Diego De Veloso , their exploits illuminate three themes that were to remain important in Cambodian history, the first was the King's susceptibility to blandishments and promises on the part of visitors who came, as it were, from "outer-space" both Spanish were honored with bureaucratic tittle and given "Sruk to govern and Princesses for wives, the second themes was the revolution in warfare brought on by the introduction of firearms, particularly naval cannon, which played a major part in all subsequent Cambodian wars ,because they were master of new technology ,Ruiz and De Veloso were able to terrorize local people- just as their contemporaries could in Spanish America , which accompanied by fewer than a hundred men.
The third themes was that by the end of the sixteenth century, the Cambodian King and his courtiers had become entangled in the outside world, symbolized at the time by the multitude of foreign traders resident in Lonvek and Phnompenh, European writers emphasized the importance of these people and the foreign residential quarters at Lonvek , these included separate quarters for Chinese, Japanese,Arabs, Spanish, and Portuguese as well as traders from the Indonesian archipelago ,they were joined briefly in the seventeenth century by traders from Holland and Great Britain, the traders worked through officials close to the King and members of the Royal family, as well as through their compatriots,  in the seventeenth century ,according to Dutch source, foreign traders were required to live in specific areas of the new capital,Udong, reserved for them and to deal with the Cambodian Government only through appointed representatives, or Shabanda .this pattern may have originated in China and also applied in Siam ,. Its presence at Lok-Vek in the depths of Cambodia's"decline" like other bits of data, suggests, that the Kingdom was by no means dead.
The Spanish missionary San Antonio left an account of the closing years of the sixteenth century,
which includes the adventures of Ruiz and De Veloso, it is often illuminating and occasionally comic,
as when he attributed the construction of the temples at Angkor to the Jews, echoing local disbelief in Cambodian technology ,he was also convinced that Span should colonize the Kingdom for religious and commercial reasons, and this way have led him, like many early explorers, to exaggerate the value of its resource,as French visitors were to do in the 1860s. his impressions of prosperity may have sprung from the fact that visitors were forced by the absence of overland communication to limit their observations of Cambodia to the relatively rich and populated areas along the Mekong North of Phnompenh- and area that was still one of the most prosperous in Cambodia when it was studied four hundred years later by Jean Devert, the goods that San Antonio saw  including gold,
silver, precious stones, silk and cotton cloth, incense, lacquer, ivory, rice fruit, elephants , buffalo,
and rhinoceros, the last was valued for its horns,skin,blood,and teeth as a 'subtle antidote for a number of illnesses , particularly those of the heart-' a reference to the Chinese belief that rhinoceros by products were effective as aphrodisiacs ,like Frenchmen of the 1860s San Antonio stressed that Cambodia was prosperous because it was a gateway to Laos, which, almost unknown to Europeans, was assumed to be some sort of El Dorado ,he closed his discussion of Cambodia's prosperity with a passage that might seem to have been lifted from,"Hansel and Gretel" there are so many precious thing in Cambodia that when the King [recently] fled to Laos, he scattered gold and silver coins ,for a number of days, along the road so that the Siamese would be too busy gathering them up to capture him.
San Antonio also remarked that the country contained only two classes of people ,the and the poor:

The Cambodians recognize only one King ,among them there are nobles and commerce,, all the nobles have several wives ,the number depending on how rich they are ,high ranking women are white and beautiful, those of common people are brown, these women work the soil while their husbands make war,,,the nobles dress in silk and fine cotton and gauze,nobles travel in liters, which people carry on their shoulders, while people travel by cart,on buffalo, and on horseback, they pay to the principal officials,and to the King,one-tenth of the value of all goods taken from the sea and land.

The slave-owning, non mercantile "middle"class noted by Chou Ta Kuan in the thirteenth century seems by now have diminished in importance ,although there is evidence from legal Codes and least one chronicle that it continued to exist ,it is possible that its place was taken in Cambodian Society by foreign traders and semi-urban hangers-on. while ethnic Khmer remained primarily rice-farmers ,officials monks, and gatherers of primary produce, another mediating"class" in Cambodia Society, of course, consisted of the Sangha , about whom San-Antonio's contempt exceeded his curiosity. what emerges from his account, and from others by European visitors, is a picture of a Cambodia  social structure that remained essentially un-changed from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth .
But as so often in Cambodian history, the rice farmers are omitted from the record, we see the people the visitors saw - the King,and elite, the foreign traders,and their slaves , inland from the Kompong,
Villages were linked to the trading capitals by economic relationships by taxation, and by the social mobility provided by Sangha ,the villagers also led their own lives ,at least,this is what we must suppose, for without such relationships,Kingship and other institutions would have withered, but like the particles of subatomic physics, in terms of which atomic behavior makes sense,these major actors are invisible to the eye.
 In the first haft of the seventeenth century,Cambodia became for the first time since the "Funan" era a maritime Kingdom, with the prosperity of its elite depended on seaborne overseas trade ,conducted in large part by the European traders ,Chinese, and ethnic Malays operating out of Sumatra and Sulawesi,European visitors-Dutch,English,and Portuguese-left records of this period that are useful as they corroborate and supplement the Cambodian chronicles, these people were also  involved in factionalism at the court and in plotting among themselves.

Noted.

 The period came to a climax of sorts in the early 1640s when a Cambodian King married a Malay and converted to Islam, he is known in chronicle as the " King who chose [ a different] region." in 1642s. a Dutch naval force attacked Phnompenh, to avenge the murder of Dutch residents of Capital, but it was driven off, in the 1650s, rival  princes sought military help from Vietnam to overthrow  the Muslim monarch, and when the troops came. they were reinforced by local ones recruited in Eastern Cambodia a pattern followed in Vietnamese incursions in the nineteenth century and the 1970s. after a long Campaign, the Cambodian King was captured and taken off in a Cage to Vietnam, when some sources assert he was killed and others that he died soon afterward of disease.

 The remainder of the seventeenth century saw a decline in international trade as Cambodia's access to the sea was chocked off by the Vietnamese and coastal settlements controlled by Chinese merchants who had fled Southern China with the Advent of the Qing dynasty, the newcomers turned Saigon into an important, accessible trading center, Phnompenh became a backwater, and by the eighteenth century, Cambodian was a largely blank area on European maps.

The End of Cambodia in the Fifteenth and sixteenth Century.

Cambodia After Angkor

Probably the least-recorded period of Cambodia history falls between Chou-Ta-Kuan's visit to Angkor and the restoration of some of the temples there by a Cambodia King name Chan in the 1550s and 1560s.the two intervening centuries witnessed major,permanent shifts in Cambodia's economy,its foreign relations ,its language,and probably although this is harder to verify-the structure,values,and performance of Cambodian-Society,evidence about these shifts that can be traced to the period itself,however,is very thin,when the amount of evidence increases and becomes reliable around 1550 or so,many of the shifts ការផ្លាស់ប្តូរ had already taken place.
Evidence from the period consists largely of Chinese references to Cambodia,for almost no inscriptions appear to have been carved ចារិក,on stone at least,inside the Kingdom between the middle of fourteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth,other source include a Cham inscription and some from Thailand,two Thai chronicles from the seventeenth century,one of them very fragmentary,probably contain some accurate information about events in these two hundred years, The Cambodian chronicles that purportedly deal with this period appear to have been drawn for the most part from folklore and from Thai chronicle traditions, and unlike those dealing with events after 1550, they are impossible to corroborate បញ្ជាក់ឬអះអាងfrom other source.

The shift from Angkor to Phnompenh

The Chinese evidence is important ,for as Michael Vickery has convincingly argued,the shifts in Cambodia's geographical center of gravity in the fourteenth century were probably connected with the rapid expansion of Chinese maritime trade with Southeast Asia,and particularly with the mainland,under the Mongols and the early Ming. More than a dozen tributary mission were sent from Cambodia to China between 1371 and 1419-more than throughout the entire Angkorean period-and although some of these may have been purely ceremonial,it seems likely that they came primarily to trade and to arrange for trade,the number of mission,and the respect accorded them by the Chinese, indicate not only that Cambodia  remained active and powerful during this period but also that the Cambodian elite, perhaps now less rigidly tied to religious foundations and ceremonial duties of Brahmanical bureaucracy,were eager to exploit the possibility of commercial relations with China,how and why this shift in their thinking and behavior occurred is impossible to ascertain,but both Vickery and Oliver -Wolter have held that the shift should not necessarily be connected with the notion of "Decline"for as Wolter has remarked,"perhaps we have become too ready to regard the decline of Angkor in fourteenth,and fifteenth centuries as being on a catastrophicគ្រោះមហន្តរាយ scale,indeed,throughout this period,rulers inside the present-day frontiers of Cambodia were able to compete for resources and trade with their new and convince the Chinese of their continuing importance and were occasionally able,well into the seventeenth century,to defeat the Thai in War.
Because this shift of emphasis was accompanied by so few"Angkorean"activities (such as stone temple construction,inscriptions,and expanded irrigation works),authors have often spoken"
Decline:where" change" would be more appropriate,for another,the world suggests that Jayavarman VII,for example,was in some ways a more authentically Cambodian King than the Theravada one observed in 1296 by Chou Ta-Kuan,some authors have connected the abandonment of Angkor-historical event that probably took place in the 1440s,with a national failure of nerve and certainly with major losses of population.such losses,the argument runs,would have made it impossible to maintain irrigation works at Angkor,and the water,becoming stagnant,could have become a breeding place of malarial mosquitoes ,further depleting the population in a spiraling process,still others have argued that Theravada Buddhism was in some was subversive of Angkorean cohesionសិនិទ្ធពល while it invigorated the politics of Ayudhya and Pagans in Burma,the "Peaceable" nature of this variant of the religion has been used to explain Cambodian defeats,but not its victories or those of the Thai who shared the same beliefs.
What emerges from the evidence is that Cambodia was becoming post-Angkorean well before the abandonment of Angkor,Angkorean institutionsស្ថានប័ន -inscriptions,stone temples ,a Hindu-oriented Royal Family and extensive irrigation,to name only four traditions-seem to have stopped,faded or been redirected soon after the conversion of the Cambodian elite to Theravada Buddhism,an event that probably took place not long after Jayavarman VII's death,it would be premature to see these changes as springing uniquely or event primarily from the ideology or content of the new religion, it is more likely that they were related to the rise of Ayudhya to the west and to the entanglement ការប្រទាក់គ្នា which was to last until the 1860s.between the Thai and Cambodia courts,people,Idea,Texts, and Institutions migrated west from Angkor to Ayadhya,where the were modified and eventually reexported into Cambodia to survive its genuine decline from the eighteen century onward, much of this migration wold have consisted of prisoners of war,including entire families swept off the west after successive Thai invasions of Angkor,the most important occurring in 1431,as this process was going on.people and institutions were also migrating southward to the vicinity of Phnompenh,where the Capital of Cambodia was to remain for the next six hundred years.
The suitability of Phnompenh as a site for a Cambodian Capital sprang in large part from its location at the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap,a fortified city at this point-The "Four Faces" could control the river in-trade from from Lao as well as trade in rough pottery,Dried-fish,and Fish-Sauce from Tole-Sap, to say nothing of coming goods -Primarily Chinese in origin-approaching from the Mekong Deltas. still largely inhabited by Khmer,one the choice had been made to become a trading Kingdom-and it is impossible to say when,how,or why this happened-locating the Cambodian capital at Angkor no longer made much sense.
It is likely that the shift of the capital also represented a momentary truimph.later legitimized and prolonged ពន្យាពេល,of regional interests, and perhaps those of an individual overlord,at the expense of people lingering near Angkor or gathering strength in the Menam Basin to the West, these members of the Southeast Cambodian elite for these interests took the form of chiefs and their following,rather than rice farmers singly or en masse- probably took advantage of their distance from Ayudhya to trade with China on their own account,it seem likely,also,that they could rely on support from overlords long entrenched in the religion,which was the heartland of "Funan"aa area where Angkorean writ had often been ignored.
but these are suppositions,it seems more certain that the myth connected with the founding of Phnompenh,which tells of an old woman's discovery of a Buddha image floating miraculously-downstream, was concocted after the city had come to life,under a name that has survived into modern Khmer as Chatomuk or Four faces- an interesting echo of the iconography of the Bayon.
The role [played by foreigners adept at trade in this new city is difficult to asses,but influential figures probably included speakers of Malay,from Champa or the Indonesian islands,or  who left such words behind in Cambodian language as Kompong or landing place' and "Psaar or maket, as well as several bureaucratic titles and adeministrative terms,the Malay legacy may indeed have been deeper than this and needs to be explored,for seventeenth century European descriptions of riverine Cambodia, and the way its politics were organized, strongly resemble descriptions from this era and letter of riverine Malaya.other foreigners active in Phnompenh were the Chinese,already busily trading at Angkor in thirteenth century,there were three thousand of them in Phnompenh in the 1540s,it seem likely that Chinese and Malay traders and their descendants married into Cambodian elite just as the Chinese continued to do in the colonial era,tightening the relationships between The King,his entourage,and commercial profits.
By the late fifteenth century, it seem, the social organization bureaucracy,and economic priorities of Angkor-bas on the importance of irrigation,forced labor,and the primacy of a priestly caste-were no longer strong enough or relevant enough to balance the human costs of maintaining a Cambodian capital at Angkor,new forms of organization new settlement patterns.and new priorities for the elite based in part on foreign trade became feasible and attractive,if we view Angkor from this perspective rather than in terms of a collapse,it is not surprising that the city was not re-occupied and made a capital again.even in periods when Cambodian King may have thought of doing so,as in the late sixteenth century.
Some of the reasons for the change have already been suggested.another element conducive to it might be called the emulation សារម្ភfactor affecting both Phnompenh( and other capital nearby) and Ayudhya,these were newly established trading Kingdoms respectful-but perhaps little wary-of idea of Angkor ,by the 1400s,Ayudhya and these Cambodian City looked to each other rather than to a Brahmanical past for exemplary behavior,until the end of the sixteenth century.moreover,
Phnompenh (Lon-vek or Udong)and Ayudhya" considered themselves,not separate polities ,but participants in a hybrid culture ,the mixture contained elements of Hinduized Kingship,traceable to Angkor,and Theravada monarchic accessibility,traceable to the Mon-Kingdom of Davaravati,perhaps,which had precised Theravada Buddhism for almost a thousand years,as well as remnants of paternalistic បិតុនិយម,village-oriented leadership traceable to the ethnic forerunners of the Thai, tribal peoples from the mountains of Southern China,in both Societies the Buddhist Sangha,or monastic order, was accessible ,in its lower reaches at least,to ordinary people,brought into contact with each other through wars,immigration,and a share religion,the Thai and the Khmer blended with each other and developed differently from their separate forebears.
This blending was rarely peaceful,both Kingdoms estimated political strength in terms of controlling manpower rather territory and interpreted such strength( and tributary payment s) as evidence of Royal merit and prestige,the Thai would have learned from the Khmer,and vice verse, to a large extent via prisoners of war.between the fourteenth century and the nineteenth century there were frequent wars,generally west of the Mekong,between the Cambodians and the Thai, these laid waste the regions through which invading and retreating armies marched and invasions usually coincided with periods of weakness in the areas that were invaded.in the 1570s,for example,after Ayudhya had been sacked by a Burmese army,several Cambodian expeditions were mounted against Siam.

The end of part 1 Cambodia after Angkor.

kampuchia and Cambodia

Throughout the history,except where we refer to the regimes that have governed Cambodia since 1975,we have refrained from using the name"Kampuchea" I have preferred to use "Cambodia"
because it is still more widely used in English than "Kampuchea" and also because we do not except the right of a regime to say how its name it to be pronounced in a foreign language ,I feel this especially in Cambodia case,because Democratic Kampuchea's documents,written in Khmer,showed so little respect for local pronunciation of other countries name and in fact often preserved the French pronunciation transliterate into Khmer! in other words ,I respect the fact that" Denmark"
Italy"and republic Dominica,are inside those countries,preferred pronunciations to the Anglicized "
Denmark" Italy, and Dominican Republic but should the person on the street in one of these countries, talking about America,be required to say "United States"?
Moreover,it is not as if we had been asked,after 1975,to give the Cambodian people back the name of an ancient Empire or of an Ethnic grouping battered by colonialism,that task was attempted by the Ill fated Khmer Republic,Kampuchea "derives from the Sanskrit 'Kambuja" the name of a tribe in Northern India associated with myth of Cambodian Origin,the name is as"Cambodia "in origin as New-York is "American"

The Temples Of Jayvarman VII

In the second stage of Jayavarman's Reign he erected temples in honor of his parents,the first of these
now as Ta-Proum(Ancestor Brahma),was dedicated in 1186,it honored Jayavarman's mother in the guise of Prajnaparamita. the goddess of wisdom,conceived metaphorically as the mother of all Buddhas.the temple also housed a portrait statue of Jayvarman's Buddhist teacher or Garu (the word KRU means" Teacher in modern Khmer) surrounded in the temple by statues or more than six hundred dependent Gods and Bodhisattva,the syncretism of Cambodian religion is show by the fact that Shaivite and Vaisnavite ascetics were given cells on on the temple grounds alongside Buddhist Monks and learned men,the appearance of Ta-Prohm today gives a poor Idea of its original appearance,for unlike the other major temple at Angkor,it has never been restored.instead,it has been left to the mercy of the forest.
The next temple complex to be built by Jayavarman II is know nowadays as the Preah Khan( Sacred Sword) Its inscription says that it was built on the site of an important Cambodia Victory over the Champas ,andits twelfth-century name,Jayasri( Victory and Throne) may echo this event,no other inscription mentions this battle,fought so close  to Yasodharapura as to suggest a good Cham invation of the City,Groslier. however has argued that it took place and has proposed that it is depicted is Bas-reliefs at the Bayon.
Preah Khan was dedicated in 1191 and houses a portrait statue of Jayavarman's Father,
Dharanindravarman ,with the traits of Lokesvara the Deity expressive of the compassionate aspects of the Buddha,the symbolism is relentless appropriate,for in Mahayana Buddhist thinking the marriage of wisdom( Prajna) and compassion(Karuna)gave birth to enlightenment,which it to say,to the Buddha himself, the Englightened One. In this stage of Jayavarman's artistic development,Lokesvara appears more and and more frequently,and throughout his Reign,the Triad of Prajnaparamita (Wisdom),the Buddha (Englishtenment)and Lokessvara(Compassion)was central to the King's Religious thinking.the the placement of the two temples Southeast and Northwest of the new center of Yasodharapura(later occupied by the Bayon)suggest that the three temples can be"Read"together.with the dialectic of compassion and wisdom giving birth to Englishtenment represented by the Buddha image that stood at the center of the Bayon,and thus at the heart of Jayavarman's temple-Mountain.
The inscriptions from these two."Parent temples"show us how highly developed the Cambodian bureaucracy had became, particularly in terms of its control over the placement and duties of the population, but also in terms of the sheer number of people in positions of authority who were entitled to dis posit and endow images of deities inside the temple Ta-Prohm housed several thousand people, as its inscription attests.
"there are here 400 men,18 high Priests,2,740 other priest,2,232 assistants,including 615 female dance.a grand total of 12,640 people,including,those entitled to stay[ In additional there are] 66,625 men and women who perform services for the Gods,making a Grand total of 79265 people,
Including the Bumese,Chams etc.

Similarly the people dependent on Praeh Khan- that is to say,those obliged to provide rice and other services -totaled nearly a hundred thousand drawn from more than five thousand three hundred  villages,the inscription goes on to enumerate people who had dependent on previous temple endowments,drawn from thirteen thousand five hundred villages,they numbered more than three hundred thousand the infrastructure needed to provide food and clothing for the temples to name only two types of provision -must have been efficient and sophisticated.
Three interesting points emerge from the inscriptions ,one is that outsiders-"Burmese",Chams etc,
were account for indifferent ways than local people were,perhaps because they were prisoners of War without enduring ties to individual noblemen,Priests,or religious foundations ,another is that the average size of the village refer ed to in the inscriptions appears to have been about two hundred people including dependent-still the median size of the villages in Cambodia in the 1960s,finally,the inscriptions indicate that the temples ,although dedicated to the Buddha and serving as residences for thousands of Buddhist Monks. Also housed statues and holy men associated with different Hindu-sects, Jayavarman VII obviously approved of this arrangement,for we know that he also retained Hindu thinkers and bureaucrats at his Court,indeed ,it is probably more useful to speak of the Coexistence of Hinduism and Buddhism in Jayavarman VII's temples,and perhaps in his mind as well than to propose a systematic process of synchronization.
The jewel-like temple known as Naek Po'n(twining Serpents) នាគព័ន forms an island in the Jayatataka and was probably completed by 1191 for it mentioned in the inscription of Praeh Khan.

The King has placed the Jayatataka like a lucky mirror,colored by stones,Gold and Garlands,in the middle, there is an Island,drawing its Charm from separate basins,washing the mud of sin from those coming in contact with it,serving as a boat in which they can cross the ocean of existences.

The island with its enclosing wall, constructed in a lotus pattern,was intended to represent a mythical lake in the Himalayas,sacred to Buddhist thinking around the temple, as at the lake,four gargoyles spew water from the larger lake into the smaller ones,the temple itself,Raised above the water by a series of steps, was probably dedicated ,like Praeh-Khan,to Lokesvara, whose image appears repeatedly in high relief on its walls,.
Groups of statues were place at the four sides of the temple unfortunately,only one of these.representing the horse Balaha. an aspect of Lokesvara can be identified with certainty two others are probably representations of Siva and Vishnu,Jean Boi-  has argued that the presence of these Gods inside the enclosure can be read as a political statement,showing that the former Gods of Angkor were now submitting to the Buddha,but why they should they do so ? Boi- following Mus,has suggested that Shaivism and Vaisnavism were seen to have failed the Cambodia when the Chams were able to destroy so much of Angkor in 1177,lake Anavatapta,moreover ,was sacred not only to all Buddhists but particularly to Buddhist rulers,or Chakravartin, beginning legend asserts ,with the Emperor Asoka, who was able magically to draw water from the lake to enhance his own purity and power.
Boiselier,has argued that the political significance of the temple goes even further,as it was know in the Praeh-Khan inscription as the Rajasri,translatable as " The Regalia ".and Neak Po'n probably housed palladia of the Kingdom,Boiselier believed that it was torn down by the Thai when they captured in 1431 and according to their chronicles កាលប្បវត្តិ carried off Cambodia's regalia to their own Capital City of Ayadhya,in the Thai View ,the destruction of Neak Po'n delegitimized the universal Kingship of Jayavarman VII and his successors in the sixteenth century,when was invaded by the Burmese,these very regalia were carried off to Burma,where two Cambodian statues, perhaps from Neak po'n,can now be seen in Mandalay.
In this second phase of his iconography Jayavarman VII also sponsored additions to many early structures-notably the temples of Pimai in Northeastern Thailand and Praeh-khan in Kompong svay,new constructions at this time included  the massive ruin known today as Banteai-chmar in Northwestern Cambodia.
The sheer size of these foundations suggests a trend toward urbanization under Jayavarman VII,or at lease a tendency to herd and collect large numbers of people from peripheral បរិមណ្ឌល areas into the service of the state, it seems likely that Jayavarman VII.like Suryavarman before him, was attracted to the Idea of increasing centralization and the related idea of bureaucratic state control, perhaps these ideas formed part of what he perceived as a mission to concert his subjects to Buddhism or were connected with organizing people to respond swiftly to foreign threats.
The second phase was marked by several stylistic innovations,these included the motif of multi faced towers,inaugurated at the small Temple of Prasat Praeh Stung and carried to its apex in the entrance gates to the City of Angkor-Thom and,ultimately,in the hundreds of faces that look down from from the Bayon,the stone walls surrounding the entire City,apparently for for the first time in Angkorean history,and the causeways of giants outside the gates of the City.
These constructions can be read in terms of both politics and religion Boiselier, following Mus has compared the wall-building at Angkor-Thom to a fortified Maginot-Line,supposedly offering an impenetrable defense against any Cham invasion,at the same time,the walls can be said to represent the ring of mountains that surround MT meru or Jayavarman's temple-mountain, the Bayon.
After capturing the Cham capital in 1191,Jayavarman probably spent the rest of his Reign at Yasoharapura,at this very point,his building began to show signs of hasty construction and poor workmanship as well as of a shifting ideology,the temple that was to become the Bayon, for example was radically altered at several points in the 1190s,it is tempting to seek an explanation for the haste and quantity of Jayavarman's monuments in his personality or in otherwise unknown aspects of his life,did the temples represent an attempt to impose his legitimacy and point of view on his successors? Was he attempting to purify Angkor after it had been desecrated by the Cham ?did he have personal shortcoming to atone for ? evidence to answer these questions is thin, but it is certainly true that Jayavarman,for whatever reason,tried to stamp Cambodia with an Ideology drawn from Mahayana Buddhism and with his own personality as well ,these two aspects of his Reign overlap in his portrait statues and perhaps most dramatically នាដកម្ម in the symbolismនិមិត្តរូប of his idiosyncratic temple-mountain and of the city that surrounded it,.
An inscription from the end of Jayavarman's Reign describes the city as his Bride"the town of Yasodharapura,decorated with power and Jewels ,burning with desire ,the daughter of a good Family,,, was married by the King in the course of a festival that laked nothing under the spreading dais of his protection,the object of the marriage, the inscription goes on to say,was "the procreation of happiness throughout the universe"
At the center of the city was Bayon(Literally "Ancestor Yantra" Yantra being a magical geometric sharp) with its  hundreds of gigantic face,carved in sets of four,and its captivating bas-reliefs,
depicting everyday life,wars with Champa,and the behavior of Indian Gods,the temple at one time housed thousands of images,its central image discovered in the 1930s.was a statue of the Buddha sheltered by an enormous hooded snake,or Naga.
There has been considerable controversy about the symbolism of the temple and about what was means by the causeways leading up to it, with giants (Asura) and angles (Devata) engaged in what looks like a tug of war,grasping the bodies of two gigantic snakes,some have argued that the causeways represented the well known,Indian myth of the churning of the sea of milk,others have agreed with Mus, who saw them as rainbows,leading people out of their world into the world of the Gods,at another level,the Asura represented the Chams and the Devata,Cambodians in this respect,it is tempting to perceive the City and most of Jayavarman's works ,in dialectical វិចារវិទ្យា terms, for example,as we have seen,the Pair Lokesvara (Compassion /Father and Prajnaparamita intelligence
/Mother) give birth to the Buddha (Enlightenment,ការត្រាស់ដឹង thought to be the child of wisdom and compassionមេត្តាធ៌ម)ie Jayavarman VII himself,we have encountered this turn of mind before,in the cult of Harihara and in the opposition and synthesis in Cambodian popular thought of divinities associated respectively with Water/Moon/Darkness/Earth/Sun/and Brightness. similarly,the struggle between the Cambodians and the Champs,Acted out along the causeways and  in the Bas-reliefs at the Bayon and Banteay-Chmar,can be seen as bringing to birth the new,converted nation of Cambodia,in which the Buddha has won over the Hindu Gods of Champa,this dialectic may well be the "Message" of Bayon,which Boilselier saw as the "Assembly hall of the City of the Gods" once again,the message can be read in terms of Civil policy as well, and so can the half-smiling faces with their half closed eyes that dominate the temple,as so often in Angkorean Art,it would be arrow and inaccurate to interpret these haunting faces as representing only one kind of deity,performing one kind of task, in a way ,for example,they serve as guardians of Buddha and his teaching,in another, glancing out in four directions, they oversee the Kingdom and perhaps represent civil and military officials of the time,Boiselier ,who has argued that they are princely manifestations of Brahma,has noticed also that their tiaras resemble those worn by the Cham Asura along the entrance causeways,
perhaps,as  Woodward has suggested this signifies the conversion of the Chams to Buddhism.
Another extraordinary feature of the Bayon, found also at Banteay-Chmar,is that its bas-reliefs depict historical Cambodian events rather than,say, incidents in the Ramayana or some other literary work that coincide with or resemble historical events,the battles depicted on the Bayon are fought with recognizable weapon,and other panels depict ordinary people buying and selling,Eating,Gambling Raising children, Picking-fruit,Curing the Sick, and Traveling on foot or in Ox-Carts, nearly all the customs artifacts,and costumes depicted in the bas-reliefs could still the found in the voices of these people are missing from Jayavarman's inscriptions,they move across his bas-riefs with unaccustomed freedom citizens at last of the country they inhabit,adorning a King's temple as they never had before,perhaps the bas-reliefs are intended to show that the people have been converted and saved-which is to say,revolutionized-by Jayavarman's example,they also exhibit the "Lowest"of the worlds one traverses on the way to englishtenment,in this sense, they resemble their counterparts carved on the eight-century Javanese Buddhist monument,the Borobudur.
Unless more inscriptions come to light from Jayavarman's reign.he will remain mysterious to us, because they are so many ambiguities ភាពមិនច្បាស់លាស់ about his personality and his ideas,the mysterious springs in part from the wide-ranging social and ideological changes that characterized thirteen,and fourteen-century Cambodia and may have been due in part to forces that Jayavarman or people near him set in motion.
 Another source of ability can be traced to the uneasy coexistence សហត្ថិភាព in Jayavarman's temples and inscriptions of an overwhelming compassion and an overwhelming will,of a detachment ការផ្តាច់ of the world-symbolized by the horse Balaha at the Neak-Po'n and a detailed program aimed at tranforming the physical world of Angkor which had been go badly damaged by the Cham invasion,a third mystery is the silence-both in terms of building and inscriptions -that followed Jayavarman's Reign and appears to have begun in his declining years, we have no way of telling if Jayvarman  was in some sense to blame for this inaction ,as in subsequent inscriptions he is hardly ever mentioned for this hardly ever to mentioned, the patterns of community,stressed so often broken or damaged severely by his Reign.
The End of ,Temple of Jayavarman VII

ANGKOR-WAT

 

 

Angkor-Wat, Twelfth-Century Temple Dedicated to Vishnu,The Largest Religious Building in The world,This Image has appeared on Several Successive Cambodia Flags Since 1953.

The last years of eleventh century were ones of turmoil and fragmentation, at different times ,two or even three"Monarch" contented for the title of absolute ruler,at the end of century,however, a new dynasty which was to last for more than a hundred years,began to rule at Angkor,little is know about the first two of its Kings Jayavarman VI and his brother,Dharanindravarman I, but their great nephew,Suryavarman II, under whom Angkor-Wat was built,was like Yasovarman II and Suryavarman I.another unifying monarch,if his inscription are to be believed,he gained power while still young after winning a battle against a rival Prince leaving the ocean of his army on the field of combat,, he bounded to the head of the elephant of the enemy King,and killed [him] as a Garuda on the slope of a mountain might kill a snake"
Suryavarman II was the the first King to rule over a unified Cambodian Kingdom since Utyadityavarman II's death in the 1060s,the parallels with Suryavarman I,who was probably no relation,are numerous and instructive ,both Kings came to power following periods of fragmentation and disorder,they responded to this ,once Yasodharapura was in their hands with vigorous administrative policies,with a pragmatic style of Kingship, and by expanding the territory and man power under their control,Suryavarman II campaigned in the East,Against Vietnam and Champa,
using mercenaries drawn primarily from tributary areas to the West,he established diplomatic relations with China- the first Angkorean-King to do so,like Suryavarman I ,he also sought to separate himself in religious terms from his immediate  predecessors, Suryavarman I had done this by his patronage to Buddhism, whereas his namesake chose to exhibit a devotion unusual for a Cambodian King- to Vishu,in both case,innovative or personal policies went along with a legitimizing cluster of actions,which linked the Kings with pre-Angkorean pilgrimage sites like Wat-Phu. with Hinda gurus associated with previous Kings,and with artistic styles extending back into the Reigns of the people they had managed to overthrow.
Suryavarman II's devotion to Vishnu led him to commission the largest.perhaps the most beautiful,
and one of the most mysterious of all the monuments of Angkor- the temple,tomb,and observatory now known Angkor-Wat,the temple was not completed until after his death,about 1150,there is a striking evidence,recently uncovered,that its central statue of Vishnu, long since vanished,was dedicated in July 1131,which was probably Suyavarman's thirty-third birthday- a number with important cosmic significance in Indian religion.
What is so mysterious about the temple? first ,it opens to the West, the only major building at Yasodharapura to do so,in addition,its bas reliefs-more than a mile of them around the outer galleries of the temple are to be followed by moving in a counterclockwise direction starting from the Northwest quarter,now the customary way of reading a bas-relief or of walking around a temple was to keep it all on one's right by moving in a clockwise direction,known by the Sanskrit term Pradaksina,the reverse direction was usually associated with the dead, so was the West,for obvious meteorological reasons,(the word for"West' in modern Khmer also mean "Sink" or"Down" some french scholars argued,therefore,that Angkor-Wat ,unlike the other temples at Angkor,was primarily a tomb.
The arguments raged in learned journals until 1940.when Coedes proposed that Angkor-Wat,like fifteen other Royally sponsored Cambodian monuments,be thought of as a temple and a tomb,he cited stone receptacles ,perhaps sarcophagi,that held part of the "Treasure" of these other temples,as for the unusual orientation of Angkor-Wat.Coedes suggested that this may have been in honor of Vishnu, Suryanvarman's patron-deity,often associated with the West,Angkor-Wat is the only temple at Angkor that we know to have been dedicated to him,the twelfth century in fact,saw a vigorous revival of Vaisnavism,associated with popular religion,on the Indian subcontinent,this revival,it seems like early ones in Indian religion,had repercussions at Angkor.
Between 1940 and 1970s little scholarly work was done on Angkor-Wat,scholars and tourists were content to marvel at the artistry of its bas-reliefs (many of them concerned with the prowess of Rama)the dedicate and yet overwhelming proportions of the temple,and its continued hold on the imagination of ordinary Cambodians,in the mid-1970s, however,Eleanor Moron began studying the dimension of the temple in detail,convinced that these might contain the key to the way the temple had been encoded by the servants who designed it, after determining that the Cambodia measurement used at Angkor. the Hat was equivalent to approximately 0.4metre(1.3 feet) moron went on to ask how many Hat were involved in significant dimensions of the Temple,such as the distance between the Western entrance (the only one equipped with its own causeway) and the central tower,the distance came to 1728 Hat,and three other components of this axis measured,respectively,1296,867,and439 Hat Moron then argued that these figures correlated to the Four" Ages" or Yuga" of Indian thought, the first of these,the Krita Yura,was a supposedly Golden Age,lasting 1.728,000 years, the next three ages lasted for 1.296.000 ,864,000 and 432.000 years.
respectively,the second earliest,three times longer,and the third earliest,twice as long,the last age is the Kali Yaga, in which we are living today,at the end of this era,it is believed,the universe will be destroyed,to to be rebuilt by Brahma along similar lines ,beginning with another Golden age.
The fact that the length of these four eras correlates exactly with particular distances along the East-West axis អ័ក្ស of Angkor-Wat suggests that the"Code" for the temple is in fact a kind of pun that can be read in terms of time and space,the distance that person entering the temple will traverse coincide with the eras that the visitor is metaphorically living through en route to the statue of Vishnu in the central tower.walking forward and away from the West,which is the direction of death, the visitor moves backward into the time,approaching the moment what the Indians proposed that time began.
In her research,Moron also discovered astronomicalនក្ខត្តុយោគcorrelationsសហសម្ព័ន្ធ for ten of the most frequently recurring at Angkor-Wat,astronomers working with her found that the sitting of temple was related to the fact that its western gate aligned at sunrise with a small hill to the Northwest,Phnom-Bok moreover,at the summer solstice"and observer..standing just in front of the Western entrance can see the sunrise directly over the central tower of Angkor-Wat,"this day June 21 marked the beginning of the solar year for Indian astronomers and was sacred to a King whose name,Suryavarman, mean protected by the sun and who was a devotee of Vishnu.
The close fit of these spatial relationships to notions of cosmic time, and the extraordinary accuracy and symmetry of all the measurements at Angkor,combine to confirm the notion that the temple was was in fact a coded religious text that could be read by experts moving along its walkways from one dimensions to the next,the learned Pandits who determined the dimensions of Angkor Wat would have been Aware of and would have reveled in its multiplicity of meanings to those lower down in the society,perhaps,fewer and fewer meanings would be clear we cam assume,however,that even the poorest slaves were astounded to see this enormous temple,probably with gilded towers rising 60 metre(200 feet) above the ground and above the thatched huts of the people who had built it.
Two implications of Moron's research are that other temples at Angkor might well be studied and decoded and that this decoding can provide insights into religious and astronomical texts that have disapeared but on which the architecture of temples was based.
Although Suryavarman II probably led a campaign against Vietnam as late as 1150, the date of his date is unknown,in fact,the the period 1145-1180 produced almost no inscriptions and its history must be recreated from later source,Suryavarman's successor,perhaps a cousin reached the throne under mysterious circumstances,probably in a cop d'etat.this new King.Dharanindravarman II,appear to have been a fervent Buddhist,although there is impossibility that he never Reigned as King at Yasodharvarman,around 1160 he was succeeded by Yasovarman II who Reign is recalled in one of Jayavarman VII's inscriptions,there Yasovarman is given credit for putting down a mysterious revolt in the Northwest,The people who led this revolt,according to the inscription,were neither foreigners nor members of the elite,in bas-reliefs at the temple of Ban tiey Chhmar, they are depictedបរិយាយ as people with animal head, perhaps the revolt,like the communist rebellion ការប្រឆាំង in the 1970s,
was a supposedly unthinkable one,organized by the downtrodden segment of the society and by " Forest People" against and allegedly unassailable elite.
Instability continued in the 1160s,Yasovarman was assassinatedធ្វើឃាតកម្ម by one of his subordinates មនុស្សក្រោមបង្គាប់,who then declared himself to be the King,at this time also the tributary state of Louvo sent tributary mission to China, suggesting at least partial independence from Angkor,the absence of inscriptions and the questionable legitimacy of rulers reinforce the impression of rapid change.
Perhaps,as B,P Groslier has suggested,the hydraulicជលគតិវិជ្ជាorganization of the Kingdom had already begun to falter during the Reign of Suyavarman II's,this system of reservoirs and canals,which guaranteed one harvest a year in dry times and two with adequate rainfall,was the basis of Angkor's rice-oriented agricultural economy and allowed the concentration of large populations in this area. Groslier has suggested that the system reached peak efficiency in the mid-eleventh century as the hydraulic components of Angkor-Wat hundred years later were much smaller than those around earlier Temple mountain,indeed, Groslier goes on under Suyavarman II for the first time in Cambodian history,hydraulically based Cities were built at considerable distance from Angkor-at  Boeng Mealea and Kompong Svay, perhaps this was done because the water resources in the Angkor region,which had lasted so long, had now been tapped to the limit,water came from a network of small streams,running south from the hills to the North along the slight slop that extended to the shores of the Ton-Le sap, as demands for water increased,these stream were diverted closer and closer to their source,this process reduced the nutrients that the stream brought to fertilize the Angkorean-plain.
Because the slops of the plain is so slight,in dry periods the canals would probably have been nearly stagnant,especially if unstable political conditions warfare,or epidemics had drawn off the labor normally used to maintain them,Grolier has suggested as other scholars have done,that this in ceasing stagnation may well have coincided with the appearance of malaria on the Southeast Asian mainland,accelerating the process,here as so often,we lack generalized statements about conditions at Angkor or any overall statistics that might tell us about the size and composition of the population,the condition of the hydraulic network at particular times,and the relationship-or lack of it-between particular Kings and productive agriculture life.
 The closed  relationship between water management,priesthood, and temple foundations that Characterized Angkor somewhat resembles the social organization of ancient Egypt and is similar also to the Mayacivilization of medieval Guatemala,in all three cases ,grain surpluses (of Wheat,Rice or Maize) the Priest,who served as patrons of temples and advisers to the Kings ,in various ways,all three Culture-like the regime of democratic Kampuchia in the 1970s, were engrossed in what Marx,described as the Asia mode of production ,although,as we have seen,some King at Angkor,like Suryavarman,were more"Asiatic" than others.
 The end of Angkor-Wat.

Angkorean Kingship

There are three ways of looking at Cambodian Kingship in its heyday at Angkor, one is to study the King's relationship with Siva,Paul mus,in a brilliant essay written in 1933, has argued that Siva's popularity in classical Southeast Asia may be traced in a large part to his role as an earth and an ancestral spirit, emerging from the earth(and thus from ancestors) at first,"Accidentally" in the form of an outcrop of stone later purposefully,carved into the shape of a lingam representing the ancestors and later still,as  representing the rulers and ancestors of a particular place,Siva in this sense was a literary form of an ancestor spirit,held responsible for fertilizing មានផល the soil by including rain to fall on the region under his jurisdiction នីតិកម្ម,this aspect of Cambodian Kingship(found elsewhere in Southeast Asia,paryculary in vietnam) endured into 1960s in the countryside,Siva and his consort,Uma,were Gods to whomsacrifices Buffalo's or human beings were addressed because they were though of as divinization ប្រសិទ្ធិភាពof what lay under the earth.intriguingly.when looked at in this way,the Cambodian King. as a patron of Agriculture,resembles a Chinese emperor far more than a Raja of Traditional India.
The role of Cambodia King as not merely to bring rain or to keep every one's ancestors contentedly at bay, a second way of looking at Cambodia Kingship ,through the eyes of the people,is to see it in terms of the King's repeated and ritual enactment of lordliness and superiority in battle, sexuality,possessions,ceremony,and so forth,seen in this way,the King was not an Earth spirit or a priest but the hero of an India epic. this is the view taken in the most of the Sanskrit-language inscriptions of Cambodia that Praised Kings as embodiments វត្ថុតំណាង of Virtue,Actors above Society,associated in many cases with the sky, The Sun,Indra,Vishnu,and Rama rather than with earthly or ancestral forces.as living superlatives( for each King was seen as "The Greatest" rather than one of many) Kings provided the poets with a point of comparison, a kind of polestar from which society,flowing outward and downward,metaphorically organized itself, first through the Varnas near the King and then on to free people,villagers.and slaves, the King was superhuman without being helpful in any practical sense, He was a Hero, occupying the top of society because of his merit and his power.
To members of the Angkorean elite, this reenactment of lordliness had at least two two purposes, the first was to present Godlike behavior(e,g Building a Temple-Mountain in imitation of Mt Meru or Defeating"Hordes of Enemies) in order to obtain blessings for the King and the Kingdom. The correct performance of rituals-especially exacting with regard to timing-was crucial to their efficacy, in this context, the word "Symbol" in a twentieth-century sense, is rather empty, the King believed in the rituals.so did his advisers,Ceremonies were the vehicle through which his lordliness-in which he also believed-was acted out.
A third way of looking at Kingship is in terms of everyday Cambodian life. Sanskrit inscriptions are far less useful here than the Cambodian ones,although Society at Angkor, at first glance,appears to have been almost mechanically organized into Strata, the inscriptions point to webs of relationships.responsibility,and expectations,within which everyone appears to have been entangled.
seen in this way,the King, as a polygamist,a patron,and a giver of names,was perhaps the most entangled of them all.Ian Mabbett's thoughtful study of Angkorean Kingship shows the rang of things a King was expected to do,approve and know about.these included bestowing title and emblems on his high officials, granting land and slaves to numerous religious foundations contracting and maintaining irrigation works,constructing,decorating and staffing temples and conducting foreign relations,particularly,in this era ,with Champa to the East of the Capital and with various tributary states to North and West. the King was also the Court of last appeal,and the inscriptions tell us how obscure squabbles involving landholdings often floated up through the Judicial system to reach him a feature of Kingship that endured into the twentieth century.
At the same time,although the inscriptions tell us litter about it, to survive a King had to be a political operator. as Mabbet- has pointed out,many Sanskrit inscriptions praise the acumen of Kings in terms of their resemblances to Rama or their knowledge of Indian political texts as political manuals. these learned writings certainly gave Cambodian Kings plenty of room for maneuver,but it is in just this area -the day,today preferment,quarrels, and decision's- that the inscriptions are of so little help, the Flavor of life at court in Angkorean times is inaccessible.
The inscription are of more assistance in telling us about the other levels of Cambodia Society-free people and slaves-but again only at the moments described,recalled,or honored by an inscription.
Mabbatt' study of slavery at Angkor,which builds on early ones by Y, Bonggert and A Chakravati,
shows the the bewildering complexity of categories in use for what we could call" Slaves" and the bewildering number of of tasks that were assigned to them. as suggested in Chapter 2 It is still impossible to sort the terms out either diachronic-ally or across the corpus of inscriptions, there are cases,for example of Slaves' who own slaved"Slaves" who married members of the Royal Family
and free people who were disposed of by other just like slaves,working back from later periods,one gets the impression that most of the people at Angkor were subjects[Reas] rather than objects or free people,they were at the disposition of patrons,who had the right to sell them to other people and,in many case,they disposed of lower" people themselves,in the inscriptions "slaves"are listed a commodities.
These people were certainly the Giants មនុស្សមាឌធំ who were once thought to have built Angkor.what can be gleaned about their everyday lives,especially from bas-reliefs,shows us that their tools, clothing,and houses changed little between Angkorean times and the period of the French protectorate,the bas-reliefs also depict their domestic animals,games and marketing and Clowns
Shamans,Ascetics តាបស,and Peddlers,we are on less firm ground however,when we seek to reconstituteធ្វើអោយខូចភាពដើម their beliefs or the stories they told each other,no popular literature can be traced back to Angkor,and Post Angkorrean Cambodia was radically អច្ចន្តិភាព altered by its close association with Thai Society and Thai Ideas,this absence of written source makes it difficult to bring the ordinary people of Angkor to life except through the thing they made-reservoirs,temples, statues of stone and Bronze,unglazed pottery,and so on,what did a slaves thing about his Master<was a master to be imitated,hated,or revered? how far "down"in to Society-or into a person's mind -did Indian Ideas Gods,and vocabulary penetrate?there is evidence that the population was more literate in Khmer tan it was in Sanskrit,but nothing is known about the way literacy was taught, the picture that emerges is one of the familiarity with Indian culture(and perhaps knowledge of occasional Indian visitors as well) among the elite,thinning out in the rest of the Society,until in the villages,as in the nineteenth century,we find ancestral spirits given Hindu names and Hindu statues treated as ancestral Gods.
As we have been seen, Cambodia imitation of India stopped short of importing the Indian caste system.although,as Mabbett has shown in another penetrating essay, a set or ritual orders using Vara nomenclature នាមវលី, formed part of the King's repertoire of patronage, for caste standing was-occasionally bestowed by the monarch on his own clients or on the clients of his associates,except at the beginning of a dynasty, a Cambodian King,like the most Chinese-emperors ព្រះចៅអធិរាជ.could rule only by extending networks of patronage and mutual obligations outward from his Palace,at first through closed associates and family members but becoming diffuse and more dependent on local power-holders-at the edges of the Kingdom. villagers far from Angkor would problably seldom have known the King's name any more than they did in early twentieth-century,when the following passages was recorded by French ethnographers working among the Cambodian population of South-Vietnam.
In former times..there were no canals,and no paths,there were only forests,with tigers,elephants,and wild buffaloes,no people dared to leave their villages,for this reason, hardly anyone ever went to the Royal City,if anyone ever reached it,by poling his canoe,the other would ask him about it,what is the King's appearance life? is he like an ordinary man? and the traveler seeing all these ignorant,
unstained by dust or sweat,he has no scars,,but of course often he had never seen the King at all.

The end of Angkorean-Kingship.

Yasovarman & His successors

His son.Jayavarman III, came to the throne សោយរាជ្យ young,was an elephant hunter,and die after ruling "Wisely"in A,D 877. the writer who provided this information had a special interest in continuity,after all,with regard to the Devaraja cult,for the Sdok-Kak-Thom inscription presumes,
perhaps mistakenly, that the ruler who patronized the Devaraja cult was the legitimate and unique ruler of Cambodia ,this may have become the case,especially after the middle of tenth century,but it is interesting that Jayavarman III's successor the first to embark on a systematic program of temple and inscriptions at Hariharalaya,made only one muted reference to this predecessor, tracing his own legitimacy to relatives of wife of Jayavarman II (not Jayavarman III) mother and to a pair of "King" about whom nothing else has come to light.
Presumable, this was a way of casting his genealogy(សន្តិវង្សវិទ្យា)back beyond Jayavarman's usurpation, thus connecting himself with the pre-Angkorrean ruler to enhance legitimacy.
In fact this very King,Indravarman ( A,D 877-889) was himself a usurper,which may account for his muddled genealogy,his Reign is important because it was the first of many to be in 1930s by the art historian Phillip S,
The first phase was to sponsor irrigation work in honor of his subjects and the watery divinities of the soil during Indravarman's Reign, a large reservoir was constructed  at Haraharalaya to trap rain water it was known as the Indratataka and covered 300 hectare (650 ares) an inscription tell us  that as soon as Indravarman become a King he made this promise,In five days ,I will Begin to dig,another purpose of such reservoirs was to indicate the extent of "King's power, and of his alliances with the Gods,by re-creating on Earth geographical features associated in people's minds with the mythical home of the God.Mt Meru, where lakes surround the central mountain,this North Indian Fantasy,translated to waterlogged Cambodia,is not devoid of ivory ,at neither are Gothic tower in U,S college town.
 The second phase was for a monarch to honor his parents and his other ancestors by installing statues of these people,usually in the guise of Gods,Indravarman sponsored statues of his parents (as well as of others ,including his mother's parents and Jayavarman II and his wife depicted as embodiments of Silva and his consort) in the stuccoed brick temple complex known today as  Praeh Ko (Sacred Cow)[គោសក្តិសិទ្ធិ ]
This charming temple,completed in 879 ,inaugurated what is now called Roluos style of Cambodia architecture,in this style,several features that were to become important later-including the custom of enclosing temples in a series of concentric moats and walls -appeared for the first time,the sophistication and carving and the predominance អធិភាព of floral motifs suggest that these skills had been developed earlies by carving wood,although of modest size in comparison with later temples Indravarman's monuments of Praeh Ko and Bakong-his"Temple-Mountain"were far more grandiose
in conception and appearance than anything that had preceded them and hint at developments in religious ideology and special mobilization for which other evidence is lacking.
An inscription from Prae Ko indicates that Indravarman had become a universal monarch by subduing unspecified contenders,In battle" which is like a difficult ocean to cross ,he raised a pathway, made up of the heads of his arrogant enemies, his own troops passed over on it; the inscription also tell us ' it seem that the creator[ Indra] tired of making so many Kings, had fashioned this King Named Indravarman [Literally 'Protected by Indra'] to form the joy of the three worlds uniquely. inscriptions far from Rolous suggest that Indravarman commanded at least briefly,loyalties in Northeastern Thailand and the Mekong Delta that confirm his seemingly ihflated rhetoric វោ
ហោសាស្រ្ត .One of these,carved in honor of one of his teachers( himself a cousin of Jayavarman II)
goes even further:
" Ruler of the entire world which he had conquered ,established on the slopes of Mt Meru, he was even steadier than the sun,which occasionally was distant."
"A top the lordly heads of the Kings of China Champa and yavadvipa[Java?] his Reign was like a flawless សុក្រិត្យ crown made from a garland of Jasmine flower"

Statements like this about Kings,which may strike us as flowery were circumscribed by the traditional characteristics of the Gods the Kings were being made to resemble,the Poets skill was thought to consist of piling up these characteristics and half-concealing some of them behind metaphor, similes,and puns ,just as the verses enumerated ways in which a King was like the God,the temples were catalogs and pictures of the world of the Gods-a sort of mirror images of another world.

The final phase of Indravarman's program,as detected by Phillip S,was to a temple-mountain,this is now known as the Bakang and took the form of a stepped pyramid,unlike the reservoir,or the Prae Ko ,The Bakang was dedicated to the King himself and was to serve,after his death,as his sarcophagus ម្ឈុសថ្ម Coedes estimated that thirteen Angkorean Kings,beginning with Jayavarman II ,built such temple mountains.not all of them have survived,and those that have can be read in different ways,First they were planned as duplicates of the mythical mountain,Mt Meru with stood north of the Himalayas at the center of the universe, like Mt Meru  they were home for the Gods and for deceased worthies-not only Kings-who had been assimilated to heaven,they were also tombs,housing the ashes of the King servatories as well in sum,the temples were Cities of and for the Dead,.
Bakang was the first Cambodian temples to be built primarily of  stone rather than brick,it was also the first to assume a precisely pyramidal shape, the temple was reconstructed by french archaeologist in the 1930s,but by then,nearly all of its bas-reliefs had disappeared.
Indravarman's son , Yasovarman , who Reigned from 889 to 910 was an important King, his inscriptions and his building suggest that he wanted to do more than his Father and to focus Cambodia around a Royal City, Yasodharapura,the "City" of Angkor bore his name until the fourteenth century.
Yasovarman's first official action appears to have been to endow "A hundred " religious hermitages,equipping each with a Royal rest house and a set of regulations twelve nearly identical inscription related to these hermitages have been discovered, two are near Rolous six of the other are from Southeastern Cambodia,where Yasovarman,though his mother,claimed family connections from Pre- Angkorean times, the spread of the inscriptions suggests that "Kampuja-Desa" was becoming a recognized concept as well as an Ideal.
Soon after this ,Yasovarman honored his parents by building the four brick temples,now know as Lolei. on an Island he built in the middle of his father's reservoir ,at the Northeast corner of the reservoir-often an honored direction in Cambodia religious thinking-he built a raised high-way running Northwestward toward the area 16 Km(10 mile) away where he planned to establish his City,this area now house  the Angkor complex.
Yasovarman's choice of Angkor was probably influenced by his plan to built his own temple-mountain  the on the summit of a natural hill ,his choice included a hill (Phnom-Krom) that was too close to the Tonle Sap and another (Phnom Bok) that was too far away ,He constructed small temples on these two hills,however,and built his main temple on the hill known today as Phnom BaKeng (literally Mount Mighty Ancestor)  and then as Phnom Kadal (Central mountain) which still lies close to the center of the Angkor complex.
The Sdok Kak Thom inscription tells us that Yasovarman"Established the Royal City of Sri Yasodharapura and brought the Davaraja from Hariharalaya to this City ,then erected a central mountain(Phnom Kan dal ) Yasovarman's mountain was not identified as Phnom-Bakeng until the 1930s in conception and execution,it is far more grandiose than any of this Father's monuments it's symbolism has been studied in detail byJean Filliozat. who has shown that the number of levels statues, towers,and stairways,when read separately and together,correspond to various number particularly 33 and 108 endowed by Indian religion with metaphysical significance ,in some cases,pilgrims approaching the monument would able to catch this allusion by counting the number of towers they could see.
To the East of Phnom Ba Keng ,Yasovarman built a reservoir ជលដ្ឋាន the Yasodharatataka roughly 6,5 Km (4 mile long) and 3 Km ( 2 Mile) Wide, a long its Southern shore he had monasteries built sects that honored Siva,Vishnu,and the Buddha ,elsewhere throughout his Kingdom, he ordered temples built on natural hills, the most notable being Phreah Vihear, on the edge of the precipice that nowadays forms part of the frontier between Cambodia and Thailand.
These activities suggest that Yasovarman was able to commantd a far larger poll of manpower than predecessors gad done, It is likely that many of these were unwilling workers,captured in raids or battles or forced to immigrate from elsewhere in the Kingdom.Yasovarman's inscriptions show him to have been a cosmopolitan សកល monarch,aware of the grandeur of Indian civilization and tolerant of different religious beliefs, as usual,however,the sources reveal very little about his political activities his alliances or his idiosyncratic ideology មនោគមវិជ្ជាពិសេស,we have tantalizing glimpses of administrative reform, including evidence that in Yasovarman's legal code fines were levied in relation to one's ability to pay and a suggestion that Taxes were efficiently collected, in kind,throughout the Kingdom,but for the most part we must settle for proclamation ការសរសេរ
សេចក្តីប្រកាស of his greatness, he was a Lion man,he tore the enemy with the claws of his grandeur ភាពអស្ចារ្យ ,his teeth were his polities, his eyes were the Veda, his glory was like a roar in all directions, his virtues make up his name. here as so often in Sanskrit verifications កាព្យសាស្រ្ត,,
many of these words are deliberate double entendre,the phrase'His eye were the Veda"for example plays on the smilarity between the verb "To see" and and the noun 'Sacred teachings" these double meanings as we have seen,appear at many points in Angkorean verse, as well as in the architecture of the temples.
Yasovarman died a round 910 ,he was succeeded by tow of his Sons in turn,little is known about them,and by 921 a brother of one of  Yasovarman's Wife had set up a rival City at Kos Ker,in what is now an inhospitable area about 85 Km(60 mile) North of Angkor.The rival began at once to perform Kingly actions, such as abuilding a reservoir and beginning work on a temple mountain,in 930,when the King died at Yasodharapura ,the usurper proclaimed himself King with the Title Jayavarman IV,work continued on his temple mountain,know today as Prasat Thom. until 930 the temple itself,housing a lingam estimated to have been 18 metre(59 feet) high and about 5 metre(16 feet) in diameter(and probably made of Metal or encased in metal,for it has disappeared) was in fact the highest of Temples erected in Cambodia,with the exception of Angkor-Wat Jayavarman IV's
inscriptions boasted that the construction surpassed those of previous King.
We do not know the roots of his colossal self-esteem, the basis of his following,or what promptected him to shift the capital so far from Yasodharapura. Kulke has argued that Jayavarman's declaring himself King while the Devaraja image was still at Yasodharapura weakened the legitimacy of cult.Jayavarman,in fact,extended it by proclaiming himself and his Kingship to be a portion of the God housed in his temple-mountain,in this way,he claimed to draw his legitimacy ធម្មនុញ្ញ directly from Siva, a notion adopted by several later Kings after the capital had returned to Yasoharapura.
Although Jayavarman's claim may seem hollow or pompousផ្លែផ្កា to us, it is clear that by force or perfusion he was able to rule at Kor Ker over large numbers of people,and in considerable splendor,
for twenty years. after his death 942,one of Sons Reign briefly,and in 944 one of his nephews( on his mother's side,a nephew of Yasavarman as well) returned to Yasoharapura as King Rajendravarman II in the words of a later inscription,this King restored the Holy City of Yasoharapura.long deserted ,
and rendered it superb and charming by erecting houses there that were ornamented  with shining Gold,Palace glittering with precious Stones,like the palace of [Indra] on earth.
Although little is known about Rajenvarman's Reign ,his imitation of procedures enacted by Yasovarman, such as building,a temple honoring his ancestors in the midle of a Lake,indicates that he wished to restor Angkorean Kingship rather to start a dynasty of his own or to connect himself with Jayavarman's dynasty at Koh Ke,Uncle Rajandravarman,two temple-mountains were built the Mebon and Pre-Rup as well as numerous other temples,especially in the North,his Reign appears to have been peacful,except for a successful campain against Champa,and it usgered in a period of prosperity
at Angkor that lasted for almost a hundred years,one aspect of this prosprity is the literary polish of Rajendravarman's Sanskit inscriptions, one of these,the pre-Rup stele.runs to almost three hundred stanzas គាថា ,glorifying Rajendravarman's genealogy ពង្សាវលី ,his learning,and his performance as King,Another aspect of his Reign was the commercial expansion,of the Khmer Kingdom westward into what is now Northeastern Thailand, a third was his public telorance of Buddhism,
Rajendravarman appears to have studied Buddhism himself,and the minister in charge of public works throughout his Reign was a prominent Buddhist.
Rajendravarman died in 968 and was succeeded by his Son Jayavarman V,who still a boy and appears to have spent several years under the close supervision of relatives and High-Officials.These men and their families figure largely in the highly polished inscriptions from his Reign. perhaps the loveliest of the temples at Angkor, now known as Bantiey Srei[បន្ទាយស្រី] Fortress of Women)was dedicated at the beginning of the Reign by and an official who was later Jayavarman's Guru.or Tutor, there is evidence that this dedicate,small-scale temple,carved of pinkish sand-stone,once served and important urban area,Today it lies half-concealed in light forest about 16 Km(10 mile) North of the Main Angkor complex,it was discovered by French surveying party only in 1916.
Although Shaivite like his father and many of the Brahmans at the Court, Jayavarman V was tolerant of Buddhism,and Buddhism scholarship flourished during his Reign,an elegantly written inscription from Wat Sithor in Kampong Cham dating from this period shows how syncretic Buddhist thinking inside Cambodia had already become, fusing elements of Buddhism and Shavism in a way  that led the nineteenth-century Sanskritist Emil Sena rt to note,everywhere one senses a manifest
preoccupation to disturb people's habits as little as possible, and to submerge deep differences inside surface similarities, Inscriptions play down Jayavarman V's role as a builder of Temple-mountain,his own, the Takeo temple,appears to be unfinished.
Jayavarman V's death in 1001 ushered in a turbulent and destructive period, but by 1003,another King,who origins are unknown,was Reigning at Angkor although the rest of Kingdom was not under his control,in the North,a prince calling himself Suryavarman-later to be King as Suryavarman I was mentioned in serveral inscriptions.
Some scholars have argued that neither of these Kings was Cambodian by blood as, Michael V- has recently shown ,however,suryavarman was almost certainly a Cambodia member of an elite family with links to the Northeastern part of the Kingdom,it is intriguing that the blueprint used by Suryavarman to take power in the first decated of the eleventh century so closely resembles the one chosen two centuries before Jayavarman II, the process involved sporadic warfare as well as the formation of coalitions -by force,marriage,and cajolery that enabled the pretender to reduce or buy off the power of local chiefs, Vikery suggested that Suryavarman had powerful allies among the Priestly families that dominated the Government at Angkor,and inscriptions of the time show him moving slowly Westward a partly depopulated Capital,over a period of years an indication in itself about the intricacy of his alliances.
Suryavarman won his final battle, an inscription tells us,"from a King surrounded by other Kings" One new element in his rise to power is his patronage of Buddhism.There is evidence from hostile inscriptions that as he rose to power he destroyed Vrah ,or religious images but the meaning of this charge is unclear,had Suryavarman been a Buddhist,perhaps the destruction would represent iconoclasm pure and simple, it is more likely that it was connected with the delegitimation of certain religious foundations whose patrons had been  slow or unwilling to cooperate with him,another inscription,in fact,suggests that during his Reign the King deliberately impoverished members of the elite who had amassed great fortunes and thus represented distinct political threats .
One of Suryavarman's first actions in reaching Yasodharapura was to arrange that an oath of loyalty be sworn to him publicly,by as many as four thousand officials,known as Tamvrac,at the newly constructed Royal-Palace,the oath has survived in an inscription, the only one of its kind, it states that officials will be loyal to the King and adds:

If all of us who are here in person do not keep this oath with regard to his Majesty, May he still Reign long,we ask that he inflict on us Royal punishment of all sorts,if we hide ourselves in order not to keep this oath..may we have reborn in the thirty-second hell as long as the sun and moon shall last.

The oath closes by asking that those who keep it be awarded religious foundations to administer as well as food for their families-as"Recompense due to people who are devoted to their master.
"Loyalty,in other words, was to be rewarded by the right to extract surpluses from regions under some sort of control by Tamvracs. who were linked by allegiance to the King,the oath marks an intensification of Royal power and also the imposition of a newly constituted,or reconstituted,elite connected to the control of land.
Suryavarman's Reign, in fact, was characterized by the intensification of several aspects of Kingship, coming at a time when bureaucratic power rivaled or even surpassed the power of the King,
Suryavarman expanded the territory under Angkorean control,colonizing the Western end of the Ton Le sap with new religious foundations,further away,in the same direction, he annexed the Theravada Buddhist Kingdom of Louvo,centered on present-day Lopburi in central Thailand, he also expanded the irrigation words at Angkor,in a move that suggests that his other policies had increased the population of the City,because this hydraulic ផលគតិវិជ្ជា program was linked to increased bureaucratic centralization,it is possible to refer to Suryavarman's Reign as on that employed the so-called Asiatic mode of production referred to by Max & Others.
Under Suryavarman,Priestly and bureaucratic functions, seldom separate in practice,were
institutionalized Government sponsored religious foundations became conduits for  Government revenue and largess in ways that remain obscure but that probably were connected with the power of Priestly bureaucratic families around the King.
His Administration was an urbanizing one,a French scholar,Henri-m du B-,has shown that whereas for the preceding three Reigns roughly twenty toponyms contained in inscriptions end with the suffix Pura ,or City" (cf Singapore,the "lion city )" under Suryavarman the number jumped to forty-seven, further evidence that his rise to power involved herding people in to conglomerations្បិណ្ឌីករណ៏ from less tightly administered rural areas,perhaps some of these Pura were Cities name only,to enhance the prestige of locally based elites, but the evidence for urbanization coincides with other things we know about Suryavarman Reign's.
There is also evidence that merchants engaged in local and overseas trade became more active while Suryavarman was King,throughout Cambodia history, the majority of such people appear to have been
in ethnic terms ,Outsiders, Chams Chinese,or Vietnamese, but reference to merchants' Reign, as usual
foreign trade involved the exchange of "Wild" goods from forested area for Civilized",once, such as Land Rice,Buffalo,and slaves were also trade by Cambodians,at this time for manufactured or exotic goods from other countries.
The extent to which Suryavarman's Reign mobilized bureaucratic and coercive* talents to concentrate people at Yasodharapura marked a departure from the past,and the success of his tactics showed subsequent Kings that the Kingdom could be organized and expanded by forcing its cultivators to work throughout the year, the food needed to support the coercive  apparatus,(Priests,Kings, bureaucrats,and armies) could not be supplied by the single annual harvests that previously had sufficed for ordinary people to survive.
In extending his power in this way, Suryavarman enjoyed the advantages of a usurper,he was free to choose and reward his trusted followers rather than finding himself hemmed in at the beginning of his Reign by hangers on from other Courts.At first,governing the country with new officials probably meant that more attention was paid to local issues for the new officials would still have debts to their clients in the countryside that their successors could ignore.
Suryavarman's  successor,Utyadityavarman II (r 1050- 1068) was a devotee of Siva, guided by a powerful Garu, he revived interest in the Devaraja cult and also revived the custom of building a massive temple-mountain- in his case, the Baphoun- to house the ling-am associated with his reign, as an inscription carved under his successor tell us.

"Seeing that in the middle of Jambudvipa, the home of Gods, there rose up a Golden mountain, He made a Golden mountain in the center of his City, out of emulation.on the summit of this mountain, in a Golden Temple,Shining with celestial brilliance, He set up a Sivalinga made of Gold"

End of Yasovarman and his Successors.

Jayavarman II & The Founding Of Angkor

What happened to 802? from the Srok Kak Thom inscription,incised in A,D 1050 in Northwestern Cambodia -a major source for Cambodian chronology and religious history ,we learn that in this year the monarch we call Jayavarman II, residing in the Kulen Hills.to the North of what was become the Angkor complex,participated in a ritual where by he became a" Universal of Monarch"the ceremonies also celebrated a cult with which the inscription is particularly concerned that of the Devaraja, a Sanskrit term that translates as "Good King"or King of Gods",unquestionable a cult linking the monarch with Siva,The ceremony had apparently been preceded some years early by an"Auspicious magic "rite"celebrated a cult site of Ba-Phnom in the Southeast.
Jayavarman II and his son.Jayavarman III left no inscriptions of their own,and this has encouraged scholars ,until recently,to suggest that the importance granted to these King as "Founders Of Angkor" has been exaggerated .The Sdok Kak Thom inscription is primarily concerned with the sacerdotal family that for more than two hundred years,officiated at the Devaraja celebrations,and yet the biographical details that the inscription provides are very useful,Jayavarman II apparently resided in the five parts of Cambodia at different times in his career,he appears to have moved from the Southeast,near Ba-Phnom,to the upper Mekong Basin,near Sambor,before moving West to occupy Aninditapura, to the North and East of the Tonle Sap,or Great Lake.
What was Jayavarman doing in these places? with all the facts we know about him- more extensive than for many later Kings- there is still something mysterious about him,who was he ?where did he come from?In a persuasive essay,Claude J- has argued that he arrived(or returned) from a place called " Java" (perhaps from island of that name,perhaps a Kingdom in Sumatra) around A,D 770,when he was about twenty years old.One of his actions,according to a tenth-century inscription found in the area of Ba-Phnom,was to perform a ceremony that "made it impossible for Java to control holy Cambodia.We do not know what the ceremony involved or why Jayavarman II was impelled to declare his independence at this time and in this way,Coedes has pointed out that although the ceremony clearly preceded the one performed on Mt-Ku Len ,it could easily have been one of several,in many parts of the Kingdom,as Jayavarman moved through them over the next thirty years.
The references are tantalizing and incomplete,was the ceremony performed at Ba-Phnom imported from Java ? or was it one that linked Jayavarman II with ancestral spirits at "Funan"? the ceremony was important enough to be noted in an inscription concerned primarily with other thing two centuries later,given Ba-Phnom's enduring importance as a cult site as recently as the 1940s.the second explanation in tempting,but evidence is lacking to support it.
The rest of Jayavarman's early career has been traced by Jacques and Oliver W- primarily,it involved a series and military campaigns and the formation of alliance,through marriages and grants of land, with locally powerful people willing to transfer some of their allegiance to a newcomer claiming to be a universal monarch,an undated inscription gives the borders of Jayavarman II's Kingdom as being"China. Champa. the ocean,and the land of cardamoms and mangoes-perhaps located to the West.
The assimilation of the Angkor region into "Kambuja-desa" occupied more than twenty years ,no inscriptions have survived from this period,and the temples appear to have been small or made of perishable materials,these undocumented years are crucial all the same,for at this time the related notions of nationhood and Kingship,remolded to fit the Cambodia scene,appear to have been gathering force, both terms should be used with caution"Nationhood" may have meant little more than having a name(kambuja-Desa) with which to contrast one's fellows with outsiders.Cambodians were insider owing their allegiance to a particular"universal"King. whose relation to them resembled "Siva" relationship with the other Gods,perhaps both these ideas came in from Java, but they were probably already known from the Indian literature of statecraft,familiar to Brahman known to have been in Cambodia at this time.
The evidence for these suggestions springs from inscriptions carved long after Jayavarman's death, but Wolters and Jacques have argued convincingly that in his progress through Cambodia,the future King welded together an assortment of disparate regions into some sort of self-aware community,whether or not Jayavarman II succeeded in this taste(or even if the taste was what he had in mind) is open to question because of the obscurity that surrounds his Reign,but it is clear that the Kings who came after him honored him as the founder of a Kingdom and as the instigator of a particular way of looking at Cambodia that was different from what their own,more provincial ancestors had been able to achieve Jayavarman II also served more practical purpose, Cambodia folk thinking has always placed great emphasis on the veneration of ancestors,or Nak -Ta ,associated with particular places once the Royal capital of Cambodia came to be at Hariharalaya"present day Rolous "ក្រុងរលួស" where Jayavarman II finally settled,subsequent Kings came to honor him as a kind of ancestral "Founder-Spirit" of the sort that every Cambodia Village possessed until recently.
Although it is no longer tenable to say that the cult of the Devaraja was in some way a ritual process by which a King became a God,or a "God-King" the evidence of ritual and ideology (មនោគមវិជ្ចា)connections between Cambodia Kingsand the God Siva is extensive,even if the Devaraja  cult as such may not have played as large a part in the serialization of Cambodia Kingship as the authors of the Sdok-Kak-Thom inscription would like us to believed,the cult,in other words,was Royal cult rather than the definitive one,Hermann-Kulke has argued persuasively that the cult involved a status of Silva,himself Devaraja,or King of the Gods,that was paraded through the streets of Angkor- and other Royal capitals at festivals-in remembrance,perhaps ,of the role the cult had played at the beginning of the Angkorean period,when Jayavarman II freed Cambodia from Java.

The end of Jayavarman II founding of Angkor.