Étienne Aymonier

French colonial officer who made the first systematic survey of Khmer inscriptions and ruins.

Étienne Aymonier, photographed in Paris in 1883. Public domain

Historical figure details
Also known as	Étienne-François Aymonier
Roles	Colonial officer; Scholar of Khmer and Cham
Period	1869 to 1888 (in Cochinchina, Cambodia and Annam)
Born	February 26, 1844, Le Châtelard, Savoie
Died	January 21, 1929, Paris
Country	France
Subjects	History & Remembrance; Language & Literacy

Étienne Aymonier (1844 to 1929) was a French colonial officer who made the first methodical survey of ancient Khmer ruins and inscriptions. He also studied the Cham and their writing. The Indologist Klaus Karttunen calls him the first European specialist of Khmer and a great pioneer of its archaeology and epigraphy.

Early life

Aymonier was born in 1844 at Le Châtelard in Savoie, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, into a family of farmers. He entered the military academy of Saint-Cyr in 1866 and joined the marine infantry. He landed in Saigon in October 1869.

Cochinchina and Cambodia

In Cochinchina he worked as an inspector of native affairs, among a long-settled Cambodian community, and began to learn Khmer. In 1873 he became deputy to Jean Moura, France's representative in Cambodia. From 1874 he taught Khmer at the college for trainee administrators in Saigon, which he directed in 1877 and 1878. For his teaching he wrote a vocabulary, a dictionary and lessons in Cambodian. Karttunen dates his Khmer dictionary to 1874 and his grammar to 1875.

From 1879 to 1881 he succeeded Moura as France's representative in Cambodia. On his tours of the country he copied and translated inscriptions, which were published in Saigon.

Survey of inscriptions

The French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres asked the government to give him an official mission to collect inscriptions in Cambodia and the former Champa. From 1882 to 1884 three campaigns of several months took him across Cambodia, Laos and part of Siam. He copied inscriptions by pressing paper onto the stone, a method called stamping (estampage). He worked with many local assistants, whom he trained in stamping, note-taking and plotting routes with a compass, and he acknowledged his debt to them.

He then went to southern Annam and settled for some months among the Cham of Phan Rang, with five Cham from Cambodia, to learn their language and collect their manuscripts. The mission ended when fighting broke out after the French took Huế. Karttunen writes that he found the first traces of Champa in Vietnam. He later published a grammar of Cham (1889) and, with Antoine Cabaton, a Cham dictionary (1906).

École coloniale

Aymonier went back to France in 1888. He became director of the newly created École coloniale in Paris and taught Khmer there until he retired in 1905. His main work, Le Cambodge, came out in three volumes between 1900 and 1904. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honor in 1883 and named to the Conseil supérieur des colonies in 1910.

He was self-taught as a scholar, and his work drew criticism. A dispute over the early kingdom of Funan set him against the sinologist Paul Pelliot, and the Academy twice turned down his candidacy as a member. He died in Paris on January 21, 1929.

Collection

On his missions Aymonier brought back hundreds of stampings, as well as steles and statues. The stampings went to the Société asiatique and to France's national library. Twelve inscribed steles, some from the 7th century and some from the reign of Suryavarman I, are kept at the Musée Guimet in Paris, along with his statues. In 1910 George Coedès wrote that the statues had never been properly listed when they moved to the Musée Guimet, so that the origin of most of the collection was unknown.

Legacy

In his obituary of 1929, Coedès wrote that Aymonier's mission of 1882 to 1885 had founded Khmer epigraphy on solid ground and brought the Cham back to notice. CambodgeMag describes Le Cambodge as an essential reference for the ancient history of Cambodia.

References