Scholars usually place the Angkorean period of Cambodian history between A.D about 802 and 1431. In fact, these years mark neither a beginning nor and end. The northwestern part of Cambodia, where the state we know as Angkor (the name derives from the Sanskrit word nagara, meaning “city”) sprang up in the ninth century, had been inhabited by Khmer-speaking peoples for several hundred years. Moreover, although the city was abandoned in the fifteenth century, it was restored as royal city briefly in the 1570s. More important, one of its major temples, Angkor Wat (i.e., the city-tenoke), was probably never abandoned by the Khmer, for it contains Buddhist statuary from every century between the fifteenth and the nineteenth and inscriptions on its walls from as late as 1747. When the Angkor complex was “discovered” by French missionaries and explorers in the 1850s, Angkor Wat contained a prosperous Buddhist monastery inside its walls, tended by more than a thousand hereditary slaves.
The two dates are usful all the same, for they mark off Cambodia’s period of greatness. At various times in these six hundred years, and only then, Cambodia-known in its own inscriptions as Kambuja-desawas the mightiest kingdom in Southeast Asia, drawing visitors and tribute from as far away as present-day Burma and Malaysia as well as from what were later to be Thai kingdoms to the west.
SOURCES FOR ANGKOREAN HISTORY
At the same time, these periods of systematic domination were infrequent and relatively shot. We know too little about social conditions at this time, moreover, to classify all Cambodian kins as “oriental despots.” Some fo them, as far as we can tell, accomplished little or nothing; other left score of inscriptions, temples, statues, and public works. Some kings ruled over a centralized, many-layered administration; others seem to have controlled only a few hundred followers. One fact that emerges from studying the kings in order-as L. P. Briggs and George Coedes have done- is the variety of people and regions they were able to command. Seem from the top, where written records emerge, the Angkoren period is easy to generalize about but hard to penetrate. Seen in term of artistic styles, media and motifs-including the facility of Cambodian poets in Sankrit-it is possible to talk about “progress,” “development,” and “progressive” and others” decadent.” Seen from the bottom, it is easy to generalize again about continuity between the era and recent times, but we are handicapped by the poverty of our sources.
Sources, indeed, pose major problems. Those connected with Sanskrit inscription on the one hand and Khmer-language ones on the other have been discussed in Chapter2, but it is important to see how the biases of these documents produce a skewed picture of Cambodian society at Angkor. The Sanskrit poems proclaim the grandeur of kings; the Khmer inscriptions exhibit the precision with which jurisdictional squabbles were prosecuted and slaves registered. Here and there, we can use inscription to cross-reference official careers; here and there especially when they provide inventories of temple treasures and personnel-they give us a glimpse of material culture. But it is as if U.S. history had to be reconstructed from obituary notices, wills deeds, and fourth of July orations and little else.
These kind of documents, of course, are mutinously dated, this means that, with some exception, the chronological framework of Angkor-particularly for the monarchs who reigned there-has been reconstructed after having been forgotten by the Cambodians themselves. The job of chronological reconstruction was never easy; it occupied much of the career of perhaps the greatest scholar associated with early Southeast Asian history, the French savant George Coedes (1886-1968). Coedes was unwilling to speculate about matters not dealt with by inscriptions and left his successors with a variety of tasks concerning the corpus of Cambodian inscription he established.
The inscriptions themselves, being dated, are rooted in time; being parts of permanent buildings, they are rooted in the landscape too. In spite of this, with rare exceptions, the inscriptions are not the place to spite of this, with rare exception; the inscriptions are not to the place to of the political process as it operated at Angkor. Instead, they usually refer to extraordinary events-contracts entered into by people and gods-observed from “above” in poetry or from “below” in prose. The history they give us is comparable, in a way, to the lighting and extinction of hundreds of torches, here and there, now and then, over the landscape o eastern mainland Southeast Asia. As each is lighted, we can look around and discern a few details of historical fact: Temple X was dedicated to such and such an Indian god, by and so, on such and such a date. It had a particular number of slaves attached to it, identified by name and sex, and with children identified in terms of whether they could walk or not. The temple lands stretched east to a stream, south to a small hill, west and north to other landmarks… and then the light goes out. We know little about the way this temple fitted into the context of its time, whether it patrons enjoyed official status, or whether the temple remained in use for months or centuries. In some inscription, descendants return to the site to restore it in honor of their ancestors; other temples seem to have lasted only as ling as individual patrons did.
The other sources we have for the study of Cambodian history are the temples themselves, and the statues and bas-reliefs they contain, as well as artifacts dating from Angkorean times that have been unearthed though out Cambodia. These tell us a good deal about the sequence and priorities of Cambodian elite religion, about the popularity of certain Indian myths, and about ways in which they reflect the preoccupations of the elite. They also tell us about fashions in hemlines, hairstyles, and jewelry; these have been used to arrange a chronology of artistic styles. The bas-reliefs are informative about weapons, armor, and battle tactics, and those from the thirteenth-century temple-mountain, the Bayon, are a rich source for details about everyday Cambodian life.
So in addition to deeds, obituary notices, and orations, we can work with tableaux showing the people of Angkor, for the most part disguised as mythical figures and with bas-reliefs showing them going about their daily business. What is missing from our sources are documents that stand above the others, giving an overall view of the society, or those that in a sense come from “underneath” it, providing details about such things as taxes, land ownership, if-stories, and folk beliefs.
