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.
