Khmer Empire
Southeast Asia / Cambodia · 802 – 1431
In 802, according to the eleventh-century Sdok Kok Thom inscription, a king named Jayavarman II had himself consecrated chakravartin — universal monarch — in a ritual performed on the Kulen plateau north of the Tonle Sap lake. The ceremony, associated with the cult of the devaraja, declared the independence of the Khmer lands from 'Java' and is conventionally taken as the founding act of the Khmer Empire. For the next six centuries the polity centered on the plain of Angkor dominated mainland Southeast Asia, at its height claiming authority over much of modern Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and southern Vietnam. Angkor's power rested in large part on water. Beginning with Indravarman I at Hariharalaya in the 870s, successive kings paired their temple foundations with enormous reservoirs called barays, of which the East Baray of Yasovarman I and the West Baray of the eleventh century are the largest. The network of reservoirs, channels, and embankments supported a dispersed low-density city that recent archaeological survey suggests was among the most extensive preindustrial urban complexes anywhere. Each major reign followed a recognizable pattern: hydraulic works, a temple to the royal ancestors, and a state temple-mountain identifying the king with Shiva or Vishnu. The empire's most famous monuments belong to its later centuries. Suryavarman II raised Angkor Wat in the first half of the twelfth century as a Vishnuite temple of unprecedented scale. After Cham forces sacked Angkor in 1177, Jayavarman VII expelled them, took the throne in 1181, and rebuilt the capital as Angkor Thom around the Bayon with its face towers, adding hospitals, rest houses, and roads across the kingdom and turning the state decisively toward Mahayana Buddhism. The long rivalry with Champa, fought intermittently from the tenth century onward, shaped much of this period, including a Khmer occupation of Champa in the early thirteenth century. The empire's later history is harder to follow as the inscriptional record thins. Jayavarman VIII presided over a Shaivite reaction in which thousands of Buddha images were defaced, while Theravada Buddhism spread among the population; the Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan, who visited in 1296-1297, described a city still wealthy and populous. Over the fourteenth century, pressure from the rising Tai kingdom of Ayutthaya, possible strain on the water system, and shifting trade routes weakened Angkor, though historians continue to debate the weight of each factor. Cambodian chronicle traditions record an Ayutthayan capture of the city in 1431, after which the court relocated toward the Phnom Penh region. Angkor was never wholly abandoned — Angkor Wat remained a Buddhist shrine — but 1431 conventionally marks the end of the Angkorian state.
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