Khmer Empire

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The Khmer Empire was the dominant power of mainland Southeast Asia from the ninth to the fifteenth century, ruled from a succession of capitals in the Angkor region of present-day Cambodia. Its conventional span runs from 802, the date a much later inscription assigns to the consecration of Jayavarman II, to 1431, the year tradition fixes for the abandonment of Angkor after pressure from the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya. Both dates are tidier than the history behind them, but they bracket the period in which Khmer kings governed a territory reaching across modern Cambodia into Thailand, Laos, and southern Vietnam, and raised the monuments for which the civilization is remembered.

At the centre of Khmer kingship stood the cult later scholars labelled the devarāja — a Sanskrit term meaning “god-king” or, on another reading, “king of the gods.” Exactly what the rite enacted is disputed; the inscriptions are sparse and have been read in opposed ways. What is clear is that the Khmer court drew its legitimacy from Indian religion, identifying the king with a great deity, most often Shiva, and binding the ruler’s power to a sacred royal linga installed on a temple-mountain. The state temple was understood as a working image of the cosmos: a stepped pyramid standing for Mount Meru, the axis of the world in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, ringed by enclosures and a moat that figured the encircling mountains and oceans. To build such a temple was to anchor the realm to the order of the universe.

The religion of the court shifted across the centuries. Early Angkor was predominantly Shaivite, with Vaishnava and indigenous strands alongside it; Suryavarman II, in the early twelfth century, dedicated Angkor Wat to Vishnu and oriented it, unusually, to the west. Under Jayavarman VII, late in the same century, the state turned toward Mahayana Buddhism, and his temple-city of the Bayon set the faces of a bodhisattva — most often identified with Avalokiteshvara — gazing out over the kingdom. Theravada Buddhism, the form still practised in Cambodia, spread among the population in the centuries that followed and outlasted the empire that the older cults had served.

How far these ideas were held by ordinary Khmer, as against the court and priesthood that commissioned the inscriptions, is among the things the record does not say. The temples and their dedications express the theology of those who paid for them. The vast hydraulic works around Angkor — the reservoirs and canals that supported one of the largest pre-industrial settlements on earth — were once read as proof of a “hydraulic” state organized around irrigation, though that thesis is now heavily qualified. After 1431 the kings moved their seat toward the south, and the great temples passed gradually into the keeping of Buddhist monks, never wholly abandoned. The stone cosmos remained standing after the empire that built it was gone.