Place
Ba Phnom
បាភ្នំ
Ba Phnom (បាភ្នំ) is a rocky hill in Ba Phnum district, Prey Veng province, about 80 kilometers from Phnom Penh.[1] Historians long placed the capital of Funan near it, and it is associated with Me Sa, a major guardian spirit.[2][3][4]
Location
Into Cambodia gives the site as Ba Phnom Resort, also called Phnom Chher Kach Resort, about 45 kilometers from Prey Veng town. From the capital the way runs about 72 kilometers on National Road 1, across the Tsubasa Bridge at Neak Loeung, and then about 10 kilometers to the left.[1] A cement stairway with a naga handrail climbs among large boulders to a pagoda on the summit, which local people, the elderly above all, look after as a holy shrine. The hill is green in the rainy season and turns grey and gold in the dry season.[1]
The district of Ba Phnum, one of the 12 districts of Prey Veng, has nine communes.[1] In the 2019 census it had 80,940 people in 21,622 households.[5]
Funan
Inscriptions call the capital of Funan Vyadhapura. In 1947 the historian Lawrence Palmer Briggs wrote that it was probably at the site of Ba Phnom, on the Mekong.[6] Michael Vickery traces that view to George Coedès, who in 1928 moved the capital from Angkor Borei, where Étienne Aymonier and Paul Pelliot had placed it, to Ba Phnom. In Coedès' account Funan's rulers later fled south from Vyadhapura to a city that he placed at Angkor Borei.[2]
Coedès relied in part on a 10th-century Sanskrit inscription from Vat Cakret, in the Ba Phnom area, which names a Shiva of Vyadhapura. An inscription of 664, from the reign of Jayavarman I, was also found near the hill.[2] Vickery shows that some of the evidence was weaker than it seemed: a word Coedès read as the name of the mountain referred to a laterite pyramid-like building. He concludes that the choice between Ba Phnom and Angkor Borei will have to rest on archaeology, and that the remains found at Angkor Borei give it the lead.[2][7]
Me Sa
The anthropologist Anne Yvonne Guillou ties Ba Phnom to Me Sa, also written Me Sar, a land guardian spirit and one of the neak ta.[4] She glosses the name as "the White Mother".[8] In the period after Angkor, yearly ceremonies honored the great guardian spirits, who were seen as the unseen deputies of Cambodia's regional kings.[4] Guillou lists the royal role that Me Sar of Ba Phnom held in the 19th and early 20th centuries among the reasons some guardian spirits stood out.[3]
The rite for Me Sar is known as "raising the neak ta". Guillou writes that it took place on June 9 and 10, 2017, with a procession, and that the highest representatives of provincial power are expected to attend.[3] Citing the historian David Chandler, she notes that buffalo and later pigs were offered, and that by the 1940s the offering was pork bought at the market.[4]
Vihear Chan
The ruined temple of Vihear Chan (ប្រាសាទវិហារច័ន្ទ) stands in Rung Damrei village, Cheung Phnum commune, in the same district. Into Cambodia dates it to the pre-Angkorian era, says its main building is of what it calls lava stone with sandstone door frames and carvings, and notes that it is on the national heritage list.[1]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Into Cambodia, Prey Veng Province (undated)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Michael Vickery, Funan Reviewed: Deconstructing the Ancients, Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient 90-91 (2003-2004)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Anne Yvonne Guillou, The Present Life of Post-Angkorian Royal Land Tutelary Spirits, in a Liber Amicorum for Ang Choulean (2020)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Anne Yvonne Guillou, Khmer Potent Places: Pāramī and the Localisation of Buddhism and Monarchy in Cambodia, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 18 (5), 2017 (author's copy, HAL)
- ↑ National Institute of Statistics, Ministry of Planning, General Population Census of the Kingdom of Cambodia 2019: National Report on Final Census Results (2020)
- ↑ Lawrence Palmer Briggs, A Sketch of Cambodian History, The Far Eastern Quarterly 6(4) (August 1947)
- ↑ Angkor Database, summary of Michael Vickery, Funan Reviewed: Deconstructing the Ancients (undated)
- ↑ Anne Yvonne Guillou, An Alternative Memory of the Khmer Rouge Genocide: The Dead of the Mass Graves and the Land Guardian Spirits (Neak Ta), South East Asia Research 20 (2) (2012)