Khmer Empire

The Khmer Empire was the Khmer state centered on Angkor, in present-day Cambodia, from the 9th to the 15th century. Its kings raised temples such as Angkor Wat and the Bayon, and a network of reservoirs, canals and moats that stored monsoon water for the rice fields.

A 1970 map showing the extent of the Khmer Empire in 1290 and in 1760.

History details
Also known as	Kambuja; Angkor Empire
History type	State
Start	802
End	15th century
Present-day countries	Cambodia; Thailand; Laos
Subjects	History & Remembrance

Dates and names

The empire followed the periods of Funan and Chenla. Its inscriptions call the people Kambuja and the country Kambujadesa. Its dates are given as 802 to 1432, as the 9th to the 15th century. The statement on Khmer art at Angkor by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) gives the 9th to the 14th century. The end is tied to the fall of Angkor to Ayutthaya in 1431, a date that is itself debated.

Founding

Jayavarman II ruled for a time at several places before he set his capital, Mahendraparvata, on Phnom Kulen, northeast of Angkor. There, in 802, a Brahmin named Hiranyadama performed a rite that made him cakravartin and set up the cult of the devaraja, the "god-king". Higham glosses cakravartin as a universal monarch, while Briggs wrote that here it apparently means simply independent or sovereign. The Sdok Kak Thom inscription of 1052 records the event. Cambodia's tentative list entry for Phnom Kulen calls it a declaration of independence from Java, and Briggs notes that the date is regarded as the start of the Khmer empire's independence. Charles Higham saw it as an answer to long rivalry among small kingdoms. Jayavarman II later moved his court to Hariharalaya, at Roluos near Angkor. Briggs writes that he ruled until 854, while the Phnom Kulen tentative list gives his reign as 770 to 835.

Capitals

Indravarman I (877 to 889) ruled from Hariharalaya. Yasovarman I (889 to 910) founded a new capital, Yasodharapura, around the hill of Phnom Bakheng, and the name stayed with every later capital at Angkor. In 921 Jayavarman IV moved the court to Koh Ker, northeast of Angkor, where he and his son reigned until 944. Rajendravarman II brought it back to Yasodharapura.

Most great kings built a new capital around a temple that housed the state cult and later became their mausoleum. In Higham's account, Suryavarman I dug the West Baray, and Udayadityavarman II built the Baphuon and the West Mebon, the temple on an island in the reservoir. Day and colleagues write that the West Baray is generally dated to the first half of the 11th century, but that no one knows its exact date. Briggs names the Baphuon's builder as Udayadityavarman I. Suryavarman II, crowned in 1113, built Angkor Wat. After Cham forces sacked the capital in 1177, Jayavarman VII took the throne in 1181. He built Angkor Thom, a walled and moated city of about 9 square kilometers (3.5 square miles), with the Bayon at its center, as well as Preah Khan, Ta Prohm and Neak Poan.

Extent

Briggs wrote that early in his reign Jayavarman II held land reaching the borders of Nan-chao, to the north, including all of present-day Laos and most of present-day Thailand. A ninth-century inscription says that Kambujadesa stretched from China to the sea. The inscriptions of Yasovarman I run along the Mekong between its delta and Wat Phu in Laos, and westward past the Tonle Sap into Battambang. In the 11th century, Khmer rule spread along the Mun valley and as far as central Thailand. Under Jayavarman VII the empire reached its widest limits; he conquered Champa in 1190, and Champa regained its independence in 1220.

UNESCO writes that the empire covered much of Southeast Asia. Higham read the inscriptions differently: in his view Angkor never ruled a wide empire. Its core lay in the lowlands of Cambodia and the Mun valley, and distant regions kept their own noble families, who held local power for generations.

Religion

The state cult centered on a linga of Shiva that bore the king's name. Suryavarman I was a Mahayana Buddhist, and Suryavarman II worshipped Vishnu, to whom Angkor Wat is dedicated. Jayavarman VII was a Mahayana Buddhist. The great stone faces on the Bayon and the city gates probably show him as a bodhisattva, or the bodhisattva Lokesvara, in Briggs's reading.

Theravada Buddhism spread among the Khmer in the 13th and 14th centuries or, in Nhim Sotheavin's account, from the 14th century.

Economy and water

Angkor lies between the Kulen hills and the Tonle Sap lake, with broad rice land and plentiful fish. Heavy rain falls for about six months of the year and little for the rest, and growing a surplus of rice depended on controlling water. The kings built reservoirs called barays. In 879 Indravarman I began the Indratataka, close to 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) long; Yasovarman I's East Baray covered twice its area. The West Baray covers 17.6 square kilometers (6.8 square miles). The whole network of reservoirs, channels, moats and dikes spread over about 1,000 square kilometers (390 square miles). It probably served for flood control, irrigation and ritual.

The temples drew goods and labor from the villages assigned to them. Inscriptions at Ta Prohm list 79,365 people who supplied it with rice, honey, milk, clothing and other goods. The Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan, who spent almost a year at Angkor in 1296 and 1297, wrote of a market held each day, where women took a prominent role.

Decline and the move south

Few buildings rose after the reign of Jayavarman VII. As Tai peoples settled in the Menam valley of present-day Thailand, the Khmer withdrew from the upper Menam and Mekong valleys by 1300. Briggs dated an attack from Ayutthaya that took Angkor to 1430 and 1431. He wrote that the Khmer retook the city the next year but did not keep it as their capital, mainly owing to the shift in religion and the cost of keeping up the old temples. In Takako Kitagawa's reading of the royal chronicles, King Ponhea Yat left Angkor in 1431 for Basan, in Srei Santhor, and later moved to Phnom Penh. Nhim Sotheavin points out that the date 1431 appears only in the annals of Ayutthaya. The Khmer chronicles say only that Ponhea Yat moved to Basan because Ayutthaya attacked often and held western provinces.

Nhim Sotheavin also holds that Theravada Buddhism weakened the god-king beliefs on which Angkor rested. A sediment core from the West Baray shows the water system changing in the 14th century, at a time of failed monsoons in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Its authors link these changes with the kingdom's decline. The same paper lists war, changing trade, overpopulation and environmental stress among other proposed causes. People went on living at Angkor into the 16th century, while the political center moved south.

Legacy

Later Khmer kings ruled from Longvek and then Oudong. In the 16th century King Chan I briefly returned to the Angkor area, restored some temples and added reliefs at Angkor Wat. Phnom Kulen is a sacred mountain, and Khmer pilgrims come to it from across the country.

Angkor became a World Heritage Site in 1992. Its park covers about 400 square kilometers (150 square miles), and villages whose families trace their roots to the Angkor period farm rice there. UNESCO credits the art of Angkor with a deep influence over much of Southeast Asia. In the 1930s the first Khmer-language newspaper took the name Nagara Vatta, "Angkor Wat".

References