No one knows for certain how long people have lived in what is now Cambodia, where they came from, or what languages they spoke before writing was introduced, using an Indian-style alphabet, around the third century CE. Carbon 14 dates from a cave at Laang Spean in northwest- ern Cambodia,
however, suggest that people who knew how to make pots lived in the cave as early as 4200 BCE. Another
cave, near the ocean, was inhabited about a thousand
years later. Presumably the first Cambodians arrived long before either of these dates; evidence of a more primitive, pebble-working culture has been found in the eastern
parts of the country. Skulls and human bones found at Samrong Sen, in- habited since around 1500 BCE suggest that these prehistoric Cambodi- ans physically resembled Cambodians today.1
Whether the early people came originally from what are now China and India and from elsewhere in Southeast Asia is still debated by schol- ars, as are theories that waves of different peoples moved through the region in prehistoric times. But recent finds suggest that mainland Southeast Asia had a comparatively sophisticated culture in the prehis- toric era; some scholars even attribute the first cultivation of rice and the first bronze-casting to the region. In any case, it is likely that by the beginning of the Christian era the inhabitants of what is now Cambodia spoke languages related to present-day
Cambodian, or Khmer. Lan- guages belonging to the Mon-Khmer family are found widely scattered
The “changelessness”
of Cambodian history was
often singled out by the French,
who in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
saw them- selves as introducing change and civilization to the region. Ironically, this theme was picked up by Pol Pot’s revolutionary regime, which claimed that Cambodians were asleep or enslaved for two thousand years. Both points of view ignore a great deal of evidence; arguably, the revolution of the 1970s was the fifth major one that Cambodia has un- dergone since prehistoric times. But prerevolutionary Cambodians were less contemptuous of tradition than Pol Pot was. “Don’t choose a straight path,” a Cambodian proverb
tells us. “And don’t reject a wind- ing one. Choose the path your ancestors have trod.” Part of this conser- vatism, perhaps, is characteristic of a subsistence-oriented society in which experimentation can lead to famine and in which techniques of getting enough to eat are passed from one generation to the next.
We know very little about the daily lives of Cambodians in prehis- toric times. We do know that their diet, like that of Cambodians today, included a good deal of fish. It seems likely that their houses, from an early date, were raised above the ground and made accessible by means of ladders. Clothing was not especially important; early Chinese ac- counts refer to the Cambodians as naked. After about 1000 BCE per- haps, they lived in fortified villages, often circular in form, similar to those inhabited nowadays by some tribal peoples in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Sites of such villages have been excavated in eastern Cambodia.2 The Cambodians, like other early inhabitants of the region, had domesticated pigs and water buffalo fairly early, and they grew varieties of rice and root crops by the so-called slash-and-burn method common throughout the tropics as well as in medieval Europe. These early people probably passed on many of their customs and beliefs to later inhabi- tants of the region, although we cannot be sure of this, and there are dangers of reading back into prehistoric and early Cambodia what we can see among so-called primitive tribes or twenty-first-century peas- ants. We cannot be sure that these modern customs have not changed over time. Hairstyles, for example, changed dramatically in Cambodia as recently as the early eighteenth century, and in the 1970s they were changed again by the revolutionary regime.
All the same, it is unlikely that certain elements
of Cambodian life and thinking, especially in the countryside, have changed a great deal since Angkorean times (from
the
ninth to the mid-fifteenth centuries) or even over the last few thousand years. These elements might include the village games played at the lunar new year; the association of ancestor spirits (nak ta) with stones,
the calendar, and the soil; the belief in water spirits or dragons; the idea that tattoos protect the wearer; and the cus- tom of chewing betel,
to name
a few.
INDIANIZATION
The notion of changelessness dissolves, however, when we discuss the revolutionary changes that suffused Cambodia at the beginning of the Christian era. This was the centuries-long phenomenon known as Indi- anization, whereby elements of Indian culture were absorbed or chosen by the Cambodian people in a process that lasted more than a thousand years.3 No one knows precisely when the process began or how it worked at different times. All-inclusive theories about it advanced by French and Dutch scholars usually put too little emphasis on the ele- ment of local choice; a few writers, on the other hand, may have tended to exaggerate the importance of local elements. Generally, as George Coedes has remarked, scholars with training in Indian culture empha- size India’s “civilizing mission,” while those trained in the social sci- ences stress the indigenous response.
Historians must deal with both sides of the exchange. The process by which a culture
changes is complex. When and why did Indian cultural elements come to be preferred to local ones? Which ones were absorbed, revised, or rejected? In discussing Indianization, we encounter the cate- gories that some anthropologists have called the Great and others, the Little traditions, the first connected with India, Sanskrit, the courts, and Hinduism, and the other with Cambodia, Khmer, villages, and folk reli- gion. In the Cambodian case, these categories are not especially useful. We cannot play down the Great Tradition
in Cambodian village
life. Where does monastic Buddhism fit in, for example, or Little Tradition activities, like ancestor worship
and folk stories,
at the court? Village wisdom always
penetrated the court,
and princely values
enshrined in Hindu epics and Buddhist
legends, or jataka tales, penetrated village life. Nowadays, urban and rural cultural traditions interact in Cambo- dia in a similar
fashion.
Nevertheless, the process of Indianization made Cambodia an Indian- seeming place. In the nineteenth century, for example, Cambodian
peas- ants still wore recognizably Indian
costumes, and in many ways they behaved more like Indians
than like their closest neighbors, the Viet- namese. Cambodians ate with spoons and fingers, for example, and car- ried goods on their heads; they wore turbans rather than straw hats and skirts rather than trousers. Musical instruments, jewelry, the alphabet, and manuscripts were also Indian in style. It is possible also that Indians had introduced cattle raising in Cambodia at a relatively
early date; it is unknown, to a great extent, in the rest of mainland Southeast Asia.
Trade between prehistoric India and Cambodia probably began long before India itself was Sanskritized. In fact, as Paul Mus has suggested, Cambodia and southern India, as well as what is now Bengal, probably shared the culture of “monsoon Asia,” which emphasized the role played by ancestral, tutelary deities in the agricultural cycle.5 These were often located for ritual purposes in stones that naturally resembled phalluses or were carved to look like them. Sacrifices to the stones, it was thought, ensured the fertility of the soil. Cults like this were not con- fined to Asia, but it is useful to see, as Mus has, that an Indian traveler coming across them in Cambodia would “recognize” them as Indian cults honoring the god Siva or one of his consorts. Similarly, a Cambodian visiting India, or hearing about it, would see some of his own cults in those that honored the Indian god.
During the first five hundred years
or
so of the current
era, India pro- vided Cambodia with a writing system, a pantheon, meters for poetry, a language (Sanskrit) to write it in, a vocabulary of social hierarchies (not the same as a caste system),
Buddhism, the idea of universal kingship, and new ways of looking at politics, sociology, architecture, iconography, astronomy, and aesthetics.
Without India, Angkor would never have been built; yet, Angkor was never an Indian city any more than medieval Paris was a Roman one.
Indian influence in Cambodia was not imposed by colonization
or by force. Indian troops never invaded Cambodia, and if individual Indians enjoyed high status, as they often did, it was partly by convincing local people that they deserved it. When Indians came, at first as adventurers, perhaps, or as traders, they were absorbed
into the local
population. Perhaps just as often, news from India came via Cambodian traders who had visited the subcontinent. Indianization never produced the identity crisis among Cambodians that Chinese colonization
and cultural imperialism produced among the Vietnamese. Cambodia never resisted India, which was not, in any case, a unified
state. Moreover, unlike Vietnam vis-à-vis
Han China, Cambodia never looked to India—after the four- teenth century
or so—for ideas, approval, or advice. Indianization gave a format and a language to elite Cambodian life, but it was not narrowly political. Moreover, the hierarchical arrangements that came to characterize the language and behavior of the Cambodian elite, al- though owing something
to Indian models, never sprang from a recognizable caste system affecting Cambodian society
as a whole. At the village level, caste considerations never took root; what resembled
a caste system at the medieval Cambodian court, moreover, probably was little more than a set of ritual procedures that showed respect for Indian traditions.6 Another by-product of Indianization in Cambodia is that Cambodian nationalism, unlike its Vietnamese counterpart, has not generally pictured
itself as the product of a struggle
against foreign invaders and advice. Instead, national identity, until recent times, was seen as the
sum of social arrangements in effect
inside Cambodia. Indianization and elements of life that may be traceable to India were
merely components of the sum. The fact that they came from India (just as our polysyllables so often come from Greece and Rome) was not considered
a reason for alarm.
Like
many Southeast Asian countries, Cambodia
has a legend that originates with the marriage of a foreigner
and a dragon princess, or nagi, whose father was the king of a waterlogged country. According to one version of the myth, a brahman
named Kaundinya, armed with a magical bow, appeared one day off the shore of Cambodia. The dragon- princess paddled out to meet him. Kaundinya shot an arrow
into her boat, frightening the princess into marrying him. Before the marriage, Kaundinya gave her clothes to wear, and in exchange her father, the dragon king, “enlarged the possessions of his son-in-law by drinking up the water that covered the country.
He later built
them a capital, and changed the name of the
country to ‘Kambuja.’”7
This myth is of Indian origin, as is the name Kambuja,
and perhaps it describes some obscure
confrontation that had occurred during
the Aryanization of southern
India rather than an event in Southeast
Asia. But if it is useless
as a fact, it offers us an interesting starting
point for Cambodian history.
In the myth, Cambodians see themselves as the off- spring of a marriage between
culture and nature.
Kaundinya’s accep- tance by his father-in-law, who drains the kingdom for him, is crucial to his success. This idea would have been familiar to Cambodians, for until recently
a prospective bridegroom
often had to gain his in-laws’ approval by living with them before
his marriage. In the myth, the local people (i.e., the dragons) respect
the brahman and, in his honor,
give the kingdom an Indian name (which first appears in a Cambodian
in- scription in the ninth century
CE).8 Later on, many Cambodian
mon- archs would trace their ancestry
to this mythical pair, who represented, among other things, a marriage
between the sun and the moon. To be a legitimate king, it seems, one had to be Cambodian and Indian at the same time.
FUNAN
Chinese officials recorded the Kaundinya myth; indeed, for the first few centuries of the Christian era, written sources for Cambodian history are almost entirely Chinese. These are supplemented by archaeological findings, especially from the remains of an ancient trading city located near the modern Vietnamese village of Oc-Eo in the Mekong Delta, ex- cavated during World War II by an archaeological team supervised by Louis Malleret.9
Roman coins found at the site and at Angkor Borei date from the sec- ond and third centuries, and some Indian artifacts, including seals and jewelry, can be dated to the same period. Malleret believed that the port declined in importance in the fourth century. No contemporary records about it have survived, however, and we do not know what it was called by its inhabitants.10 Because of its location, and some of the artifacts found at the site, Malleret concluded that the port was used by pilgrims and traders moving between India and China in the first centuries of the Christian era. The size of the city suggests that it played an important part in this trade, and its location was ideal for ships hugging the coast and “turning the corner” from or into the South China Sea.11 The city probably provided warehousing for goods in transit between India and China and was an outlet for products collected from the forested inte- rior of Cambodia and Vietnam.
Until the twentieth century, forest products and precious metals made up the bulk of Cambodia’s export trade. These included gold, elephants, ivory, rhinoceros horn, kingfisher feathers, wild spices like cardamom, and forest products such as lacquer, hides, and aromatic wood. Planta- tion exports like rubber and pepper were developed in the colonial era; rice exports, which made up the bulk of twentieth-century Cambodian foreign trade, were also of little use in early times, when nearly everyone in the region produced enough to feed themselves. The point to make about these high-value, low-bulk goods is that they were cultivated or caught by forest people rather than by the inhabitants of towns. Many of them probably traveled considerable distances before they reached Oc-Eo, and so did the goods or coins that traders used to pay for them. Until very recently, many scholars believed that Oc-Eo was the sea- port for an important kingdom identified by Chinese sources as Funan and located by George Coedes (using linguistic evidence rather than archaeological findings) near the small hillock known as Ba Phnom, in southeastern Cambodia, east of the Mekong. According to Coedes, the word Funan derives from the old Khmer word for mountain (bnam), and he located the ritual center of the kingdom at Ba Phnom. A cult to Siva as a mountain deity existed in Cambodia as early as the fifth cen- tury CE and may well have been enacted on Ba Phnom. An Indian trav- eler to China reported that “it is the custom of the country to worship the celestial god Mahesvara Siva. This deity regularly descends on Mt. Mo-Tam so that the climate is constantly mild and herbs and trees do not wither.”12
Paul Wheatley has suggested that the cult originated in southern India and that the mountain was not Ba Phnom but another hillock not far away, in what is now Vietnam.13 The evidence that either mountain was a cult
site is stronger than the evidence that Funan was a major, unified kingdom or that its political center was associated with either hill. What made the place important to the Chinese was that a principality dubbed Funan by the
Chinese offered tribute
to the Chinese
emperor, on an irregular basis, between 253 and 519. Stone inscriptions in Sanskrit and Khmer from a century later
are available for study; they do
not pro- vide evidence for a major kingdom.14
It is possible, nonetheless, that small chiefdoms in Cambodia occasionally banded together and called themselves a kingdom for the purposes
of sending tributary goods to China (an ideal occasion for encouraging trade) or of seeking Chinese help against their neighbors. It is also possible that Funan was thought to be a major kingdom
because the Chinese
wanted it to be one and, later, because French scholars were eager to find a predecessor for the more centralized kingdom of Angkor, which developed in northwestern Cambodia in the ninth century.
Despite their usefulness in many ways, Chinese sources for this period present peculiar problems for the historian, as many of them un- critically repeat data from previous
compilations as if they were still true. Nonetheless, Chinese
descriptions are often as vivid as this one about Funan:
The King’s dwelling has a double terrace on it. Palisades take the place of walls in fortified
places. The houses are covered with leaves of a plant which grows on the edge of the sea. These leaves are six to seven feet long, and take the form of a fish. The king
rides mounted on an elephant.
His subjects are ugly and black; their hair is frizzy;
they wear neither
clothing nor shoes. For living, they cultivate the soil; they sow one year, and reap for three. . . . These barbarians
are not without their own history books; they even have archives
for their texts.15
There is evidence that the major step during the Funan period toward the integration of the small, dry-rice-growing and root-cultivating principalities, whose
people worshipped Siva, with hunting
and gathering societies
inland from Oc-Eo was the introduction, perhaps as late as 500, of systematic irrigation; drainage probably came earlier. We have seen in the
Kaundinya myth that drainage was attributed
to
the good offices of a dragon king, but the most important
passage related to this in- novation, and to Indianization, is Chinese, one which appears at first to be a garbled
version of the original myth:
Then a Brahman named Kaundinya
ruled the kingdom. A spirit announced to him that he would be called upon to govern
Funan, so he traveled
there . . . and the people of Funan came out to meet him, and proclaimed him king. He changed the institutions to fol- low Indian models. He wanted his subjects to stop digging
wells, and to dig reservoirs in the future; several dozen families could then unite and use one of these in common.16
Seventh- and eighth-century inscriptions refer to rice fields adjacent to religious foundations that are suggestive of irrigated rice, and aerial photographs of the Mekong Delta show silted-over canals, which may have been used for drainage as well as transport.17 If irrigation was widely used before the ninth century, it was not on an especially large scale and, with the exception of the seventh-century agglomeration of Isanapura (now known as Sambor Prei Kuk, near Kompong Thom), the village was the most characteristic unit of pre-Angkorean Cambodia. In- deed, Isanapura probably consisted of villages grouped around a com- mon ritual center, whose stone buildings have survived. Even after the introduction of wet-rice technology, perhaps in the fourth or fifth cen- tury, the area under irrigation, which is to say, under the control of supravillage organizations, was never very great. Moreover, it seems likely that most villagers in the hinterland continued to grow dry rice and to cultivate roots, supplementing their diet by hunting and gather- ing, long after irrigation and wet-rice cultivation had taken hold in com- paratively Hinduized communities.
People, rather than land per se, are needed to cultivate wet rice. Keep- ing in mind this fact, as well as the low density of the population in the entire area (always excepting Java, Bali, and the Red River delta in Viet- nam), it is easy to see why, throughout Southeast Asian history,
over- lordship and power were so often thought of and pursued in terms of controlling people rather than land. Population pressure, of course, probably impelled some Cambodian rulers, perhaps including Jayavar- man II, to take control over new territory where the
population could be deployed to grow rice. There were periods of Cambodian history, under Jayavarman VII in the twelfth century, for example, when far-flung ter- ritorial control was an important part of a king’s prestige.
Nonetheless, control over territory per se (mere forest in most cases) was rarely as im- portant as controlling people.
Indeed, the notion of alienable ownership of land, as distinct from land use, does not seem to have developed in pre-Angkorean Cambodia. Land left fallow for three years reverted to
state control. The king, theo- retically at least, was the lord of all the land in the kingdom,
which meant that he could reward people with the right to use it. Many of the Cambodian-language inscriptions from the Angkorean period, as we shall see, dealt with complicated
disputes about access to land
and labor resources. The record of inscriptions and, by inference, of architectural remains from the first eight centuries of the Christian era fails to provide evidence of large-scale
unified kingdoms on Cambodian soil and aside from Angkor Borei very little evidence of the development of urban cen- ters. There seems to have been some continuity among members of the elite, traceable in part to their tendency to marry among themselves, as we learn from surviving inscriptions.
At the same time, it seems likely that the territory we now call Cam- bodia, like much of the rest of early Southeast Asia, contained a collec- tion of small states, each equipped with a court and an elite, and that these segments had entourages, or “strengths,” of people growing food for them who could also be called upon to fight. Presumably, these chiefdoms traded among themselves and raided each other, particularly for slaves. It also seems likely that each king, when undisturbed (or when disturbing others), thought of himself as a universal monarch, benefiting from Indian teachings, as well as a local chieftain, performing identifiable Cambodian tasks.
Leadership was measured to a large extent by prowess, which was measured by success in battle, by the ability to attract a large following, and by demonstrated
skill at performing religious rituals and providing protection. As J.D.M.
Derrett has pointed
out, protection, along with rainfall, is the sine qua non of peasant society: protection from enemies, from rival overlords, from the forces of nature.18 In recognition of this necessity, overlords in the time of Funan and throughout Cambodian history often included in their reign-names the suffix varman (originally “armor”; hence, “protection”).
The overlords themselves thought that they could not live without su- pernatural protection, and most of them sought
this, in part, through their devotion to Siva. Here they were assisted, for a time at least, by a group of Indian brahmans, the so-called pasuputa, who enjoyed a vogue in India and elsewhere in Southeast Asia around the fifth and sixth cen- turies.19 These wandering ascetics
preached that personal
devotions to Siva were more rewarding than meticulous attention to brahmanical rit- uals or to the law of destiny, or karma. Technically, an overlord’s devo- tion did not require the intercession
of the pasuputa, and some of them presumably did without
it. In any case, these self-made Hindus
were perceived, and saw themselves, as superior men, vehicles of Siva, the god who “ceaselessly descended” onto a holy mountain.
The transmission of Siva’s potency via the overlord and his ritual acts to the people and the soil was an important source of cohesiveness in Cambodian society.20 It has also been a source of continuity. As late as 1877, human sacrifices to a consort of Siva were conducted
at Ba Phnom at the beginning of the agricultural year. Like those described in fifth-century Chinese sources, these had the objective of transmitting fertility to the region and, like the Chinese rituals, they were sponsored by local officials.21
In the Funan era, Buddhism also flourished in Cambodia, and the Bud- dhist concept of merit, which still suffuses much Cambodian thinking about society, resembles, in some ways, the notions of prowess and sal- vation just discussed. In both schemes of thought, power and ability were seen—especially by those who did not have them—as rewards for virtuous behavior in previous lives. The loss, diminution, or absence of power, moreover, revealed to people that a previous existence had been in some way flawed. A person’s status in society, therefore, was pro- grammed by someone else’s performance in the past, and one’s behavior here and now determined where one would stand when one returned to life. To improve personal status, then, one could accumulate merit by performing virtuous acts, like subsidizing a temple or being generous to monks, donating a gilded image of a god, or sponsoring religious festi- vals. Acts like these were thought to redeem the person performing them. As we shall see, the great temples at Angkor were also thought of as redemptive gestures of this kind, as bargains struck by kings with their immediate ancestors and, through them, with the gods. No one at the time or later could see if the bargains were a success, but the thought of neglecting to make them, especially when the afterlife meant a return to earth, occurred seldom if at all.
The notions of patron, client, and entourage become important dur- ing later stages of Cambodian history—they are certainly useful keys to nineteenth-century Cambodian society, and to some extent Cambodian political life today—but it would be dangerous to assume that precisely similar arrangements were in effect in Cambodia in the sixth and seventh centuries. We seldom know how overlords came to power, for example, or how they recruited followers. We do not know what made followers linger in their service, or often what the services entailed. The evidence suggests that we can describe pre-Angkorean society in Cambodia as an aggregation of leaders and followers, occupying spaces of territory and spaces in society that were thought about in terms of centers and periph- eries, corresponding to the Indian concept of mandalas although the term itself was not used in a political sense in Cambodia at the time. With a multiplicity of centers, Cambodia was decentralized; segments of what we would call “society” (i.e., the total of the aggregations) acted inde- pendently of each other or were related in sporadic ways.
Things were not quite as simple, however. Localized religious cults, like the ones Evéline Porée-Maspero and others examined in Cambodia in the 1940s and 1950s,22 generally stressed the welfare of the commu- nity rather than that of the individual, for without communities to per- form the work, irrigated rice cannot be grown. Rural life requires alliances. The human sacrifices at Ba Phnom were one example of this communal orientation. Others included the complex of rituals still ush- ering in the agricultural year today—the sacred furrow, the towers of sand, and so forth; the royal cults that in effect negotiate with the dead for the welfare of the kingdom; and the boat races that take place in flooded rivers at the end of planting. Although these cults at first appear to be antagonistic to each other (the Great and Little traditions once again), in fact they are complementary.
Because genealogies were not maintained in Cambodia, except among the elite, the nak ta, or ancestor people, had no family names. They thus became the symbolic ancestors of people in a particular place, or by dy- ing in a place they came to patronize its soil. Nak ta in inhabited sites could be spoken to
and tamed;
those in the forest or
in abandoned
places were thought to be more powerful and more malignant. As a place was inhabited, ancestral traditions over the years gathered around it, al- though seldom to the same extent as in China
or Vietnam.23 The pre- Angkorean record is almost silent about nak ta, but we can assert, by reading back from modern data, that a confrontation between
Hindu and local beliefs was less frequent than was a blending of the
two.
The tendency to syncretize, in fact, was noted by early Chinese
visi- tors. The passage
that refers to Siva’s
continuous descent onto Mt. Mo- tan, for example, also mentions a bodhisattva, or Buddha-to-be, that was held in reverence at the time. Occasionally, two Indian gods were blended with each other, as Siva did with Vishnu to form Harihara, a composite deity much favored by Angkorean kings. By combining
the attributes of Siva, the creator
and destroyer of worlds, with those of Vishnu, the pre- server, Harihara provided a range of inspiration, and displayed an ideal monarch’s ability to hold contradictory forces in balance.24
The process of blending different religions meant that here and there local spirits received the names of Indian gods, just as localized Greek and Roman deities were renamed in the early years of Christianity. Hindu temples also were often built near sites favored by pre-Indian cel- ebrations; there are Neolithic remains underneath the palace at Angkor.25 What was being stressed at times like this was the continuity of habitation and a continuity of sacredness—ideas in themselves that had deep roots in Cambodian culture. If ancestors became Indian gods in times of centralization and prosperity, the gods became ancestors again when the rationale for Hinduism and its priestly supporters di- minished or disappeared. Thus, at Angkor, and in Cham sites in Viet- nam studied in the 1930s by Paul Mus, Indian images and temples were worshiped in quite recent times not as emanations from India but as mysterious products of the nak ta.26 This is partly because the literature of the Cham and Cambodian elites, which was used to explain and jus- tify the images and temples, had disappeared or could no longer be deci- phered, while the language village people used in their religious lives remained to a large extent unchanged from the pre-Indian era to colo- nial times.
The most enduring cult, as Paul Mus has shown, was the cult of the lingam, or stone phallus. This widely diffused motif, and the cults asso- ciated with it, exemplified links between ancestor spirits, the soil where they and the lingam “grew,” and the fertility of nearby soil for agricul- tural use. Because of the territorial aspect of the cult (a lingam could be moved from place to place, ceremoniously, but was only potent in one place at a time) and the notion that the lingam was a patron of a com- munity, it was closely supervised by local overlords and by the king in the Angkorean era. As early
as the fifth century according to Chinese sources, a cult honoring a mountain
god at the hill of Lingaparvata in southern Laos—nowadays known as Wat Ph’u—involved human sacri- fices; the site was notable because it contained an enormous
natural lingam, some eighteen meters (fifty-nine feet) high.27 Lingaparvata, like Ba Phnom, was patronized as an ancestral
site by several Angkorean
kings.
The period of Funan, then, which lasted until the sixth century, was one in which Cambodia’s political center of gravity was located south and east of present-day Phnom Penh. During this period, trade between India and China was intense, and one of the principal components of this trade was Buddhist religious objects. Local religious practices em- phasized devotion to Siva, Vishnu, and the Buddha as well as to minor and local Hindu deities, particularly female ones, known as kpoñ.28 Politics centered on villages and groups of villages, rather than on a tightly organized kingdom; irrigated rice allowed for surpluses and for some social differentiation, as Michael Vickery has argued, but not as much as developed later on. The main point to stress about the period, from a historian’s point of view, is that we know about it from Chinese sources, which tell about local customs, centralization, and commodities for trade. We hear no Cambodian voices, as we do from the seventh century onward in the form of stone inscriptions. After the waning of Funan, in fact, our sources become richer and harder to use.
GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY IN EARLY CAMBODIA
The first dated Khmer-language inscription from Cambodia was incised in 611, and the earliest Sanskrit inscription was carved two years later.29 There are some two hundred datable
inscriptions, in both languages, from the
seventh century, and these give us a picture of the way Cambo- dian society was put
together. According to the
inscriptions, Cambodian society was divided, informally
at least,
into those who understood San- skrit and those who understood only Khmer. For several hundred years, Sanskrit was used in inscriptions that supposedly addressed the gods. Khmer, on the other hand, was the predominant language of Cambo- dian men and women, those who were protected by the gods and de- scended, as gods did not, from their ancestors and the highly localized nak ta. Sanskrit inscriptions, in verse, praise the actions of kings and the elite, such as building Hindu temples,
sponsoring Buddhist monasteries, winning wars, and offering gifts to monks and brahmans. Some of the speakers trace or doctor their genealogies, as if to cash in on or invent ancestral merit; many praise brahmans at the expense of other segments of the society; and all are fulsome in praise of those in power, who have, after all, allowed the temples to be built and the stone inscriptions to be incised. Much of the verse, according to Indianists, is highly polished, subtly worded, and well composed, comparing favorably with Sanskrit poetry composed in India at the time.
Khmer inscriptions, on the other hand, are all in prose. They record the founding of temples and the details of temple administration, such as the numbers and names of people attached to a particular founda- tion. They also give inventories of temple treasures and list the dimen- sions of rice fields, orchards, and ponds (trapeang) in a temple’s jurisdiction. Many of them outline the duties of slaves and set the amount of taxes, payable in labor or in kind, levied to support the tem- ple priests. Many of them close with a curse—always in Khmer— threatening people who neglect, rob, or disrupt the temple in question with punishment over many generations.
A
little too neatly,
perhaps, the line between Sanskrit
and Khmer sep- arates the so-called Great and Little traditions. On the one hand, there are wealth, poetry, intricacy, wordplay, priests, and access to the gods, i.e., a language
that protects. On the other, there are poverty, prose, straightforward catalogs, slaves, and the world of ordinary people, i.e., a language
about what receives protection. Both sets of inscriptions used the same sort of alphabet derived from India and, as a rule, were carved by the same masons. Presumably poets and priests, if they wanted to do so, could read them both. But were they intended to be read? In general, they were accessible enough,
carved on temple
door posts or on free- standing steles; probably the texts were also kept on perishable material in archives somewhere else. The reason they were carved at all may have been that writing on stone, the medium of the gods, served a special
pur- pose. Stone was not used in secular sites; these, including palaces and ordinary dwellings, were built of wood, bamboo, and other perishable materials. Sanskrit, moreover, was said by the elite to be the language favored by the gods; stone was associated with permanence, which is to say, the dead. In incising the stones, Cambodians were speaking, collec- tively, to their ancestors; the inscriptions themselves, if in Sanskrit, spoke the language
of the gods. A curse, or an oath of allegiance, in- scribed on stone was thought to be stronger.
Moreover, the juridical aspect of the inscriptions
should not be over- looked. By recording land grants on stone, for example, it was thought that beneficiaries would be recognized
and protected; similarly, curses (in Khmer) might serve as burglar alarms
and preserve the sites from depredations.
The division between Sanskrit and Khmer was also the division be- tween those who grew rice and those who did not. It was everyone’s ambition to be “rescued from the mud,” but very few were. Most of those were placed, in Angkorean times, into various varna, or caste groupings, which made up perhaps a tenth of the society as a whole. These people included clerks, artisans, concubines, artists, high officials, and priests, as well as royal servants, relatives, and soldiers. Because they seldom served as slaves, and only a few of them were important enough to pa- tronize a temple, these people appear rarely in Cambodian inscriptions. This omission means, among other things, that we never know the names of the people who designed and carved the magnificent statuary and temples of Angkor. By the seventh century, in fact, the city of Isana- pura was already the most extensive complex of stone buildings in all Southeast Asia, built a century ahead of similar constructions in Java. All the same the presence of these free people somewhere between the summit of society, as symbolized by the king’s palace and his sacrificial mountain, and the rice fields that surrounded them should not encour- age us to call them a bourgeoisie or even a middle class, because those terms are not transferable and our information about these people is too sparse.
The connotations of Western-oriented social terms like these bedevil us when we look to other Cambodian social groups. We have already noted that the term “king,” or raja, probably meant less in Funan than it did in medieval Europe. Another important term, knjom, which can be translated as “slave,” seems to have meant something more ambigu- ous to the Khmer than our word slave. For one thing, as Judith Jacob has shown, knjom was only one of some fourteen categories of slaves in pre-Angkorean Cambodia.30 They had many levels of social status, dif- ferent origins, and many kinds of duties. Those toiling in the fields re- sembled black slaves in the antebellum American South. Others, especially those attached to temples, may have seen themselves as enjoy- ing quasi-clerical status. And yet, as all of these groups of people appar- ently could be bought, sold, and given away and had no freedom to escape, they were not servants either. Many of them were probably bondsmen working off debts contracted by themselves or by their par- ents. Were they serfs? The question should make us wary of the inter- changeability of terms, and Communist statements in the 1970s that early Cambodia was feudal are inaccurate even when it is clear that the society was exploitative and divided sharply between haves and have- nots. The evidence that connects slaves to places is incomplete, although some of them appear to have been attached to certain places for several generations. This suggests hereditary servitude, or a liability to be called on, and being attached to a place rather than to a particular lord. Some villagers were free to grow their own rice but were not free to move, others appear to have been owned by temples, still others by members of the elite. Practice and theory seem to have varied from time to time and from place to place; generalizations about Cambodian society in this period are difficult to make.
Evidence from inscriptions suggests that slaves of various kinds may well have made up the majority of the Cambodian
population at any given
time. Free peasants were liable to calls on their time and energy to perform public works, favors for an overlord, or service to a temple or to serve in wars. Many of them, in fact, were either prisoners of war or their descendants.
The slaves themselves pass in and out of Cambodian history as mere names. These are a mélange
of Sanskrit and Khmer words. From one in- scription to another, they range from respectful references (some knjom are referred to by the equivalent of Mr. or Ms., for example) to deroga- tory ones, in which slaves have names like “dog,” “imperfect,” “red-in- the-face,” and “bad-smelling.” By and large, slaves with recognizably Sanskrit names (such as “loves justice,” the “slaves of Siva,” or, merely, Dharma) tended to have slightly higher status than the others, and many of them may have served as musicians and dancers. Many of their names would be recognizable
in Cambodia today; the names of flowers, for instance, are still widely used for girls.
Another difference between pre-Angkorean slaves and those of the antebellum United States is that the villages they lived in, the food they ate, and the beliefs they shared were not very different from those found in times of freedom (whatever the term meant to a rice farmer at this time) or from those of the masters whom they served. If the knjom had been uprooted, they usually came from fairly similar cultures; the gap between the city and the countryside was not yet meaningful or wide. As servants of temples, moreover, many knjom participated in rituals that punctuated the year, such as the times when gilded images were washed,
A ninth-century statue buried in the forest near Kompong Cham. Author’s photo.
clothed, and paraded around a temple, or when the eyes of a Buddha- image were ceremonially opened. They crowded around royal proces- sions and made decorations for palanquins as these passed through. The knjom lived in the vicinity of grandeur. Among themselves, they proba- bly explained grandeur, in turn, in terms of merit and merit in terms of protection. They saw themselves as engaged, like others in the society, in plotting their own redemption. What better way to do this than to serve the priests who served the temple gods?
We can come to these tentative conclusions by reading back from re- cent Cambodian life or by studying bas-reliefs,
statues, artifacts, and in- scriptions. But as almost always in Cambodian history,
we write the peasants’ words, as it were, without having access to their voices. What would they have said? It is difficult to imagine without asking a second question: To whom would they be talking? Among themselves, of
Ninth-century statues abandoned in the forest near Kompong Cham. Author’s photo, 1962.
course, most Cambodian peasants are frank and egalitarian, but they take few risks in the presence of outsiders. The peasants’ apparent ac- ceptance of superiors has led some scholars to argue for an essential har- moniousness in traditional Cambodian society. But Cambodian history is filled with rebellions and civil wars, and events since 1970 should make us wary of writers who insist on a natural passivity among Cam- bodian peasants. The absence of peasant voices makes it almost as hard, all the same, to make a case for persistent tumult as for harmony. Most of the time there was plenty of cause for both.
Yet, pre-Angkorean Cambodia, and perhaps even Angkor itself, was not an integrated despotic state. Instead, it was a collection and a se- quence of principalities sharing a somewhat despotic language of politics and control. Because the rulers of these principalities, some of whom were women, saw themselves as absolute, they were rivals of each other and thus independent. And yet throughout the eighth century (a period about which Chinese sources are silent, for no tribute from Cambodia had arrived) Cambodia was becoming more politically coherent in a pro- cess masterfully described, using Khmer-language inscriptions, by Michael Vickery. Integration involved increased population, increased wet-rice technology, alterations in patterns of local authority and appar- ently random inputs, like victories in war or protracted periods of peace. As Cambodia’s center of gravity continued to shift northward, the area of Aninditapura, in the vicinity of present-day Angkor, grew in importance in relation to the principalities along the upper Mekong, at Sambor, and elsewhere. The distribution of pre-Angkorean inscrip- tions indicates that the more populated sections of Cambodia—as in the twentieth century, but not in the Angkorean era—were along the banks of the Mekong and lower Tonle Sap, particularly to the south of present-day Phnom Penh, with other settlements along the upper Mekong near present-day Kratie.
Until quite recently, scholars sought to consolidate this assortment of small kingdoms under the name Chenla, which was given to one of them by the Chinese and preserved in nineteenth-century Vietnamese as a name for Cambodia.
The Chinese, in fact, distinguished between two Chenlas, one associated with the Mekong Delta (and known as “water Chenla”) and the other (“land Chenla”) apparently located somewhere on the upper reaches of the Mekong, perhaps near present-day Wat Ph’u in southern Laos. The Chinese were not averse to exaggerating the im- portance of the so-called
barbarian states from which
they received trib- ute. European scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, perhaps forgetting the multiplicity of kingdoms that had characterized medieval Europe or precolonial Africa,
also chose to see Chenla
as a centralized successor state to Funan, thus making a neat progression from the earliest of these “mighty” kingdoms to the one concentrated at Angkor.31
In a brief and persuasive
essay, however, Claude
Jacques has crippled the usefulness of this interpretation:
Inscriptions give evidence in the Khmer country of a multitude of little realms and princedoms; those which the Chinese called Fu- nan and Chenla, on grounds unknown so far, were among them and may have been the most important. It seems that some princes managed, sometimes, to take the leadership of a more or less large collection of realms; but this situation was to all appearances only temporary.32
It is clear nonetheless that by the seventh and eighth centuries, coastal trading states in Cambodia like Funan (and others like it elsewhere in Southeast Asia) had faded or changed into polities farther inland, known in the Cambodian case by the collective term Chenla. The wealth of these new kingdoms derived primarily from extensive wet-rice agri- culture and the mobilization of manpower rather than from subsistence agriculture and trade. Ideologies from India, which survive today in ar- chitecture, sculpture, and inscriptions, seem to have played a prominent role in molding and directing these societies, perhaps because ideas of this hierarchical kind were useful in legitimizing the extraction of sur- pluses more or less by force. Rituals may have become associated with wealth as time went on, and wealth may have become tied to supernatu- ral skills, in a process of state formation ably discussed by Vickery and Jonathan Friedman among others.33 It is impossible, however, to recap- ture the process from the documents that have survived. What is impor- tant in terms of the sweep of Cambodian history is that the geographical and economic shifts of the seventh and eighth centuries reversed them- selves in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and that, just as the first set of changes can be associated with the formation of Angkor in the ninth and tenth centuries, the second set can be associated with the es- tablishment of a less monumental, less ambitious, and somewhat more outward-looking state centered in the area of present-day Phnom Penh.
