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Authors: Elizabeth Becker
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larger framework they needed to build a true empire. Indian Brahmans traveled to the region as early as the second century A.D., from Burma to Cambodia and Champa. These Indians, whether priests or merchants, brought the new culture as commercial and religious emissaries from India, not as a vanguard for a military conquest. India never ruled over the region. Indiaâs culture was impressed onto these Southeast Asian societies through this peaceful exchange. And much of the region was marked permanently as âIndianizedâ or âSanskritizedâ states.
The Khmers were among the most brilliant adapters of the new Indian culture. The Hindu cosmology and outlook appeared to them to be an expansion of their own vision, not at odds with it. The mingling of the two societies proved electric. The Angkor era, which lasted 600 years, proved so powerful that its basic institutions survived, however transformed or tattered, until the revolution of the Khmer Rouge.
When the Indian Brahmans arrived, Cambodia was ruled by tribal chiefs already perceived as godlike. The faith of the Khmers was animistic. The Cambodians accepted the Hindu religion of the Brahmans, including the concept of a deva-raj or god-king, without abandoning their animism, which survived into modern times. The god-king became the one all-powerful ruler of the tribal lords. Eventually, the Angkor kings came to be revered as the rulers of the gods, as well. They became among the most absolute rulers of the era, the supreme political, moral, and religious leaders of their empire. âIt is safe to say that it was the king who was the great god of ancient Cambodia,â wrote an eminent historian.
This absolute god-king was able to build a strong central state system that became the basis for the kingdomâs expansion and its wealth. At its peak in the fourteenth century, the Angkor Empire was the most powerful in peninsular Southeast Asia. Its borders stretched eastward to the South China Sea, encompassing southern Vietnam and the Mekong Delta; to the north over southern Laos as far as the royal city of Luang Prabang and touching China; to the west encompassing Thailand and parts of Burma; and to the southeast down to the isthmus of Kra, which connects Thailand to Malaysia.
The king saw little separation in his duties as conqueror, religious deva-raj, and public works administrator. The wealth of the kingdom depended on the kingâs public works, specifically the irrigation network of tanks, dams, and dikes which were revolutionary in their time. The kingdom had to master water. The extreme monsoon climate that produced alternating seasons of floods and drought had to be tamed through these irrigation projects in order for Angkor to flourish. The kings began the national waterworks system in the late ninth century, and by the fourteenth century they irrigated nearly 13 million acres of rice fields. They reclaimed and cultivated plains that had been sunk in swamps or covered by jungle scrub bush.
Irrigation not only multiplied the amount of land under cultivation but increased the number of crops planted each yearâfrom one to two and even three crops of rice. That abundant surplus of rice was the chief source of wealth for Angkor.
The irrigation system also supplemented the national highways. Canals tied the kingdom together and carried the traffic of society: boats laden with the rice harvest or with stones for monuments, boats with soldiers off to fight the empireâs battles, boats with merchants and their wares destined for trade in the wealthy capital. Above all, Angkor was a water kingdom.
It was also a society permeated by the religion of the deva-raj, a religion the kings interpreted as requiring the construction of those massive funerary temples. In the religious cosmology the Cambodians inherited from India, the center of the universe is Mount Meru, the mountain home of the gods. Angkor, the capital of the kingdom, was built
The Khmers were among the most brilliant adapters of the new Indian culture. The Hindu cosmology and outlook appeared to them to be an expansion of their own vision, not at odds with it. The mingling of the two societies proved electric. The Angkor era, which lasted 600 years, proved so powerful that its basic institutions survived, however transformed or tattered, until the revolution of the Khmer Rouge.
When the Indian Brahmans arrived, Cambodia was ruled by tribal chiefs already perceived as godlike. The faith of the Khmers was animistic. The Cambodians accepted the Hindu religion of the Brahmans, including the concept of a deva-raj or god-king, without abandoning their animism, which survived into modern times. The god-king became the one all-powerful ruler of the tribal lords. Eventually, the Angkor kings came to be revered as the rulers of the gods, as well. They became among the most absolute rulers of the era, the supreme political, moral, and religious leaders of their empire. âIt is safe to say that it was the king who was the great god of ancient Cambodia,â wrote an eminent historian.
This absolute god-king was able to build a strong central state system that became the basis for the kingdomâs expansion and its wealth. At its peak in the fourteenth century, the Angkor Empire was the most powerful in peninsular Southeast Asia. Its borders stretched eastward to the South China Sea, encompassing southern Vietnam and the Mekong Delta; to the north over southern Laos as far as the royal city of Luang Prabang and touching China; to the west encompassing Thailand and parts of Burma; and to the southeast down to the isthmus of Kra, which connects Thailand to Malaysia.
The king saw little separation in his duties as conqueror, religious deva-raj, and public works administrator. The wealth of the kingdom depended on the kingâs public works, specifically the irrigation network of tanks, dams, and dikes which were revolutionary in their time. The kingdom had to master water. The extreme monsoon climate that produced alternating seasons of floods and drought had to be tamed through these irrigation projects in order for Angkor to flourish. The kings began the national waterworks system in the late ninth century, and by the fourteenth century they irrigated nearly 13 million acres of rice fields. They reclaimed and cultivated plains that had been sunk in swamps or covered by jungle scrub bush.
Irrigation not only multiplied the amount of land under cultivation but increased the number of crops planted each yearâfrom one to two and even three crops of rice. That abundant surplus of rice was the chief source of wealth for Angkor.
The irrigation system also supplemented the national highways. Canals tied the kingdom together and carried the traffic of society: boats laden with the rice harvest or with stones for monuments, boats with soldiers off to fight the empireâs battles, boats with merchants and their wares destined for trade in the wealthy capital. Above all, Angkor was a water kingdom.
It was also a society permeated by the religion of the deva-raj, a religion the kings interpreted as requiring the construction of those massive funerary temples. In the religious cosmology the Cambodians inherited from India, the center of the universe is Mount Meru, the mountain home of the gods. Angkor, the capital of the kingdom, was built
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