Cambodian Archaeology

Southeast Asia’s earliest cities emerged by the mid-first millennium CE after more than one thousand years’ growth toward urbanism and complexity. These early cities appeared both on the coasts and in river networks; their inhabitants engaged in trade and agriculture, and selectively embraced urban and religious concepts from neighboring cultures with which they interacted. This chapter examines competing arguments for how and why cities first appeared in Southeast Asia, their timing, scale, and form. Despite heterogeneity in urban pattern, early Southeast Asian cities shared key
structural features in configuration and social construction that reflect pan-regional ideological systems. Fewer urban forms arose in insular Southeast Asia compared with the mainland, and they emerged later in time; selected examples are also included for comparison. Early Southeast Asian urban systems were participants in the process Sanskrit cosmopolitanism (sensu Pollock), but a growing body of archaeological research identifies regionalization in urban form that distinguished
even the earliest Southeast Asian cities them from their South Asian counterparts.

Angkor, the temple and palace complex of the ancient Khmer capital in Cambodia is one of the world’s most famous monuments. Hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the globe visit Angkor Park, one of the finest UNESCO World Heritage Sites, every year. Since its UNESCO listing in 1992, the Angkor region has experienced an overwhelming mushrooming of hotels and restaurants; the infrastructure has been hardly able to cope with the rapid growth of mass tourism and its needs. This applies to the access and use of monument sites as well. The authors of this book critically describe and analyse the heritage nomination processes in Cambodia, especially in the case of Angkor and the temple of Preah Vihear on the Cambodian/Thai border. They examine the implications the UNESCO listings have had with regard to the management of Angkor Park and its inhabitants on the one hand, and to the Cambodian/Thai relationships on the other. Furthermore, they address issues of development through tourism that UNESCO has recognised as a welcome side-effect of heritage listings. They raise the question whether development through tourism deepens already existing inequalities rather than contributing to the promotion of the poor.

This chapter summarizes the chronology, technology and contexts of earthenwares recovered from Cambodia's archaeological sites. It compares Cambodian archaeological ceramics with those found elsewhere in mainland Southeast Asia, and identifies directions for future research.

At its apex, the Khmer empire was Southeast Asia’s largest and most influential civilization: its civilizational reach stretched across several of today’s nation-states, and its core contained one of the world’s largest pre-industrial urban complexes. The roots of 9th-14th century Angkorian civilization appeared in the Mekong delta more than a millennium before Jayavarman II declared himself the universal Khmer monarch in 802 CE.  At the start and to the south was the early polity that 3rd century Chinese emissaries called Funan, and that contained urban centers, walled palaces, libraries, and rulers.  The earliest Khmer writing appears in the 7th century in this region, or nearly four centuries after the Han Chinese reports of Funan. By the 7th century, Khmer elite inscribed their legitimacy onto brick shrines and temples they commissioned to honor Indic gods across the delta’s landscape.  Elite sponsorship of the construction and maintenance of ritual spaces required wealth; so did their support for ritual practices at these places, which materialized order that structured pre-Angkorian society.  The rise of the pre-Angkorian Khmer state occurred during a period of fluctuating international trade in goods and ideas, and previous models have emphasized international trade as the catalyst for early state formation.

This chapter studies early state formation instead through the development of the Mekong Delta’s 6th-8th century monumental art and architecture. Brick constructions, their dedicatory inscriptions, and the statuary they housed created symbols of cultural commonality that linked formerly autonomous communities into coherent regional systems.  The Lower Mekong Archaeological Project survey area includes the early urban center of Angkor Borei. Research described here emphasizes archaeological patterning in social power to offer Southeast Asian perspectives on the articulation between ideology and social order in early states.

Early political, social and cultural history of Cambodia remains the realm of enigmas. Traditional accounts of a succession of the great kingdoms of Funan, Chenla and Angkor Empire (Briggs 1951; Coedès 1968) seem but a simplification. Recent scholarship tends to view the early political landscape of Cambodia in terms of many small principalities and unstable claims to sovereignty (Vickery 1998). Furthermore, scholars have changed the term 'Indian' to 'Indic', stressing the local culture substratum prevalence over external influence and the outward resemblance of scripts, linguistic features and sculptural styles. In 1937, the famous French historian and epigrapher George Coedès opened his seminal Inscriptions du Cambodge (1937-1966) with the Sanskrit Phnom Preah Vihear inscription K. 733. He gave its French translation and chose this text because of its brilliant Sanskrit poetry and many references to Indian culture. Recently Swati Chemburkar and Shivani Kapoor (2018), and Dominic Goodall (2019) made use of this text examining the Pāśupata School in early Cambodia. My present article focuses on a few points. First, I discuss how many kings named Bhavavarman are known from early Cambodian inscriptions of the sixth and seventh centuries. Second, I offer English and Russian translations of the Phnom Preah Vihear inscription K. 733. Third, I hope to bring together all the references to the Sanskrit root vidyā- in Cambodian Sanskrit and Old Khmer epigraphy and to examine its relation to the Pāśupata School of Shaivism. Fourth, I aim to show the Indic or Indian traits in ancient and medieval Cambodia.
For citation: Zakharov, Anton O. The Inscription K. 733 from Phnom Preah Vihear and the Root
vidyā- in Cambodia. Vostok (Oriens). No. 5. 2019. Pp. 21–32. DOI: 10.31857/ S086919080006819-7

This article provides a first edition, along with an annotated French translation, of an eighth-century Cambodian stone inscription in literary Sanskrit that was recovered from the river bank at Angkor Borei in 1993. Engraved in florid calligraphic letters of unusual grace, the inscription commemorates the foundation of a large silver image of a Viṣṇu named Tribhuvanañjaya by a favourite of the king, who appears to have been Jayavarman I bis (a king whose reign fell between those of Jayavarman I and Jayavarman II). The text is also interesting for its literary echoes and for the arguably somewhat archaic flavour of the Vaiṣṇava mythology to which it alludes. A palaeographical table of glyphs used is appended to the article.

This paper reviews the volume's collection of papers on historical and documentary approaches to ancient states. to do so, it explores the relationship between documentary and archaeological data for interpreting the origins of Angkor in Cambodia, which scholars usually equate with "Funan" and the subsequent pre-Angkorian period.