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.
