Political history of Angkor

... Collapse and Regeneration from Funan to Angkor The history of the Khmer civilization is characterized by cycles of fragmen-tation, collapse, and reorganization. ... When the Thai army sacked the capital of Angkor in ad 1432, they conquered a distinctly Khmer kingdom. ...

Cultural heritage recognised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has become the gold standard for the heritage industry. Many nations strive to have tangible, intangible and natural heritage inscribed on UNESCO’s various heritage lists. One of the most important UNESCO heritage sites situated in Southeast Asia is Angkor Wat in Cambodia, an extensive site comprising around 400 km2 of land housing countless magnificent remains of the Khmer empire. Its exploitation as a heritage site avant la lêttre can be traced back to colonial times. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Angkor Wat started to attract international attention, funds and interest, which turned it into a site that played a large role in helping UNESCO to define its heritage definition and practices.

An appreciation of the use of power by the Angkorian Empire is gained through analysing aggregated spatial and temporal data from pre-Angkorian and Angkorian period inscriptions. This paper argues that the Khmer empire depended to a significant degree on administration operating through regional centres and on its long-established communication and trade links. The mode of control varied with distance from the capital and over time. Its political economy is marked by three concurrent cycles indicative of changing power relationships: cycles of royal inscriptions, of non-royal inscriptions, and of control over peripheral territories. Angkor’s processes and strategies were sufficiently flexible for it to endure for approximately six centuries. At some stage from the fourteenth century, key processes and strategies for maintaining its integrity as an empire became less effective than before, and the cyclical pattern ended.

*ce mémoire s’inscrit dans le cadre d’un travail de recherche que mon directeur, M. Éric Bourdonneau, a mené et auquel j’ai simplement été amenée à participer.

Ce travail vise à explorer les galeries extérieures occidentales du Bayon où se trouvent les panneaux des bas-reliefs dont le sujet concerne les scènes de la guerre civile et de la cérémonie de l'Indrabhiseka. Sur le registre supérieur des deux panneaux sont sculptées les images architecturales qui sont en effet l'objet de cette étude. Nous avons ainsi tenté d'analyser ces images, singulièrement ou dans son ensemble, et posé par conséquent l'hypothèse qu'il s'agit de la représentation de la ville d'Angkor - le "panorama d'Angkor".

Il grande parco di Angkor, collocato nel cuore della
foresta cambogiana, con la sua estensione di
oltre 200 kmq, è probabilmente la più grande area archeologica
al mondo. Attualmente molti progetti internazionali
si occupano del restauro e della conservazione dei suoi affascinanti
templi. La storia dei moderni
restauri è relativamente recente e
risale per lo più ai primi decenni del
secolo scorso.

Chinese annals and indigenous inscriptions document a succession of three early states in the lower Mekong basin during the first millennium A.D. The earliest (“Funan”) emerged in the Mekong delta; the next (“Chenla”) materialized c. 250 km north along the Mekong River; the third (the Khmer state) surfaced two centuries later along the bank of Lake Tonle Sap.  Previous work has focused on the emergence of each polity, rather than on patterns of collapse and regeneration in this continuous but dynamic Khmer state.  This paper examines evidence for continuities in economic, ideological and political structures in first millennium A.D. Cambodia.

In 1988 and 1989 Keyes led delegations sponsored by the Joint Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Southeast Asia to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam to seek to re-open scholarly relations with counterparts in these countries. On the 1989, the delegation visited Angkor, trips from Phnom Penh at the time being limited to one day. There the group observed the initial efforts to re-start restoration work at Angkor following the devastating rule of the Khmer Rouge. In this paper, Keyes reflects on the legacy of Angkor as related to the political transformations of the country in the Khmer Rouge and the immediate post Khmer Rouge period.

The diary of Henri Mouhot (1826–1861), a little known French naturalist, was published posthumously in 1863. Serialised in Le Tour du Monde, a popular French magazine devoted to expeditions abroad, it had been rewritten by a ghostwriter and illustrated with engravings based on Mouhot’s own drawings. It quickly caused a sensation, not for its descriptions of the flora and fauna of Southeast Asia, but for its tales of a lost civilisation hidden in the tropical jungles of Cambodia.

Mouhot’s publications set the tone for how France, and the Western world in general, would view and imagine Angkor. They initiated the ways in which Angkor has been presented to the world over the past century and a half, with the lure of the exotic orient and enduring fantasies of discovering “lost civilisations” taking centre stage. This essay looks at to what extent these perceptions remain today and how much they have changed. It does so by exploring the paintings, photographs, architectural drawings, museum displays, and colonial expositions dedicated to the topic, and by contextualising those against the colonial mindset of the time, which framed the West’s understanding and representation of Angkor. It concludes with a look at Angkor in post-independence Cambodia, and an examination of how much the images, tropes, and exoticising stereotypes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are still being perpetuated.

This book explores marketing as a genuine component of religious traditions. It investigates the theme across a large historical and geographical area, and in a variety of expressions, ranging from 3rd BCE Maya stucco friezes, early Christian writings, and 9th CE Cambodian inscriptions, right down to modern-day propaganda and recruitment strategies adopted by the ISIS jihadi movement, Falun Gong, Muslim Varkaris, spirit mediums in India and Thailand, Thai Buddhist monasteries, and the Vatican. The book is unique in its theme and scope. The chapters were written without a single controlling agenda, but all emphasize the need to view our modern consumer society as only one among many historical conditions that have shaped religious marketing. In fact, it will become clear from reading through the chapters that marketing and propaganda are inherent in religions and their teachings. The broad scope of the book shows religious marketing as embedded in and responding to diverse cultural settings, rather than as an isolated component of utility maximization. It allows us to understand religious marketing as a large window into the mental and cultural landscapes of the studied communities. This will have an eye-opening methodological impact on an area of studies that often limits itself to a narrow view of interactions between two opposing fields: spirituality and the market. This volume will appeal primarily to students and scholars of religion, culture, communication, media, and marketing. A non-professional audience will also appreciate the well-researched and novel look on less studied aspects of religion.

This entry reviews the history of archaeological (and, by extension, art historical) research in what was first part of French Indochina, and is now the Kingdom of Cambodia.  It reviews the impact of 19th-century expeditions on European knowledge of Cambodia's archaeological past, and traces two parallel strands of research during that time: one that focused on prehistory (and emphasized geology), and one that focused on reconstructing a fallen classical civilization, akin to the ruins found in the Mediterranean. The entry concludes by discussing some developments in Cambodia's archaeological world after the end of the civil war.

The cyclical quality of ancient states (Adams 1988; Feinman 1998; Marcus 1998; Yoffee 1988b) is abundantly evident in mainland Southeast Asia, where multipleand overlapping histories of collapse and regeneration characterized the region from the first millennium AD onward (Hutterer 1982:562; Stark and Allen 1998). Many areas experienced this first pulse of state formation, from the Irawaddy River valley of Myanmar and the Chao Phraya delta of Thailand to the Bac Bo region of northernVietnam. The archaeological record of early Southeast Asia involves nucleated settlements and religious monuments that suggest a close articulation of religious ideology and sociopolitical organization (see also Hagesteijn 1996:187). The very monumentality of the ninth-fourteenth century Angkorian empire may explain why scholarship on ancient Cambodia continues to focus on the latter period of ancient Khmer civilization rather than on its earlier periods. Yet the Angkorian state represents the endpoint i...

The rapid development of early cities as ceremonial and economic centers affected their hinterlands profoundly.  The construction of the city and of the sacred precinct, which required unprecedented amounts of labor, were themselves events and performances, creating arenas for repeated performance. These new spaces were closely tied into the centers of population, and drew population from hinterlands, which became “ruralized,” depending on cities for most things apart from agricultural subsistence. In all of this elites played the primary role, while performances enhanced social solidarity and mitigated the societies’ deep divisions in power and wealth. In this chapter we explore themes that arise from comparison of our three case studies: Egypt, the Maya, and Southeast Asia.  In their earlier period, those polities conformed to the city-state type, but some of them acquired an expansionist territorial character in 9th–15th centuries CE.

Das ist ein Buch. ISBN: 978-953-7036-76-8

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG:
Die Sanskrit-Kultur Kambodschas und Indiens im Lichte der Epigraphik/



In der Einleitung der vorliegenden Arbeit werden die Grundbegriffe, auf denen die Arbeit beruht, erklärt und die zu lösenden Probleme entworfen. Methodologie wird auch dargestellt. Weiterhin wird eine Liste, die etwa 30 kambodschanischen und 6 indischen Sanskrit-Inschriften enthält, hinzugefügt, worin sich die asymetrische Struktur der Arbeit entfaltet.

Am Anfang des ersten Kapitels wird mit der Bestimmung der gesammten Kultur durch eine Sprache begonnen ohne irgendeine "grundlose Idealisierung" vorausgesetzt zu haben, weil man die Sprache als etwas mit dem priesterlichen Gesellschaftsstand, der von ihrer axiologischen Identität untrennbar ist, unvermeidlich verbunden sieht. Über Sanskrit kann nämlich in seiner wirklichen Vollkommenheit nicht genau nachgedacht werden, wenn man nicht diesbezüglich im Zusammenhang mit den Priestern, denen Sanskrit in Beziehung auf den größeren Teil seiner Aspekte und besonders in Beziehung auf seinen axiologischen Aspekt gehört, nachdenkt. Eine derartige Annäherung kann geschichtliche, gesellschaftliche und sogar materielle Sachverhalte umfassen, aber sie beschäftigt sich primär und vor allem mit Sanskrit und mit dem zu ihm eigentlich gehörenden Stand.