If one is to believe the legend, the ancient dynasties of the Khmer empire were derived from the union of a Hindu prince, Preah Thong - who had been banished from Delhi by his father - with a "female serpent-woman", the daughter of the Nagaraja who was sovereign of the land. She appeared to him in radiant in beauty, frolicking on a sand bank where he had come to make camp for the night. He took her as his wife, and the Nagaraja, draining the land by drinking the water that covered it, gave him the new country, called it Kambuja and built him a capital.

A variation, revealed on an inscription at Mison in Champa (mid Vietnam) and reproduced in various descriptions of Cambodia, substitutes for the prince the Brahman Kaundinya, who "married the Nagi Soma to accomplish the rites" and, throwing the magic lance with which he was armed, founded at the point of its landing the royal city where Somavamsa, the race of the moon, would rule.

Another popular tradition, though less widespread, gives as the origin the coupling of the maharashi Kambu and the apsara Mera, whose union is symbolic of that between the two great races, solar (Suryavamsa) and lunar (Somavamsa). This survives particularly in the word Kambuja - son of Kambu - from where derives the name "Cambodian" by which we now call the present descendants of the ancient Khmer.

Whichever version one takes, the mythical implication is undeniable and the truth remains - that the Khmer people are born of a joining of two distinct elements; Indian and native. They are not, as some would believe, simply a people of purely Indian or Hindu origin who had come, following migration, to settle in a region devoid of any inhabitants, or where the indigenous race had been eliminated by mass deportation.

Established since prehistoric times in the lower Mekong valley of the southern Indo-Chinese peninsula, that included not only present day Cambodia but also Cochinchina and parts of Siam and Laos, they were in fact a mixture - from an ethnological rather than a linguistic point of view - of people from lower Burma and various barbarous people from the annamitic chain, themselves in turn quite probably deriving from Negroid and Indonesian roots. The Indian contribution apparently resulted from a natural expansion towards the east for commercial, civil and religious reasons rather than for any brutal political motivation.

Moreover, with the fall of the Khmer empire - that so captures the imagination in the extent and apparently abrupt timing of its destruction - came perhaps a total decline and abandonment of the capital, but, mysteriously, not the entire extinction of the race. With a little help from France and a clear understanding of the glory of their past, these people soon regained an awareness of their value and began to rise again, having never ceased to exist. Having retained their fundamental characteristics - their traditions, their religion and their language - their artistic talents need only the opportunity to revive.

Some physical catastrophe, earthquake, flood, or a drying up of the country's economy has been suggested, and though it is difficult to accept that an earthquake could leave so many stone structures standing, there are however indications, such as the filling of the enormous basins and low areas of Angkor Thom and its suburbs, that render the suggestion of an overflow of the Great Lake or the rupture of some dike plausible - and it is common that such disasters usually result in epidemic and devastation. Likewise, the collapse of a perfected hydraulic system that gave life and fertility to the region could have quickly transformed to inhospitable areas of land that had until then been populated and plentiful.

But human causes suffice. Although only five centuries separate us from the date of Angkor's abandonment as capital, it should not be forgotten that a hard and far less glorious time followed the four century period - from the 9th to the 13th - of her splendour. Already exhausted by builder kings seeking to ensure their posthumous glory, the Khmer people could no longer offer resistance to a series of bloody wars followed no doubt by the systematic transfer of the population to slavery. Ruin came, but not total extinction.

I. CAMBODIA AND THE CAMBODIANS

The geographical framework of the ancient Khmer empire is reflected in that of its monuments. Although these are found grouped in a particularly dense manner in the Angkorian region to the north of the Great Lake, one can however include in totality more than a thousand remains scattered over the whole of the area between the gulf of Siam and Vientiane on the one side and between the Mekong delta and the valley of Menam on the other - that is to say in Cambodia itself, the major part of Cochinchina, lower and middle Laos, eastern Siam and a part of the Menam valley. The changes that occurred over the centuries came not from any lack of unity in the population, but rather from a contrast of a physical nature between the dry regions to the north of the chain of the Dangrek mountains and the fertile plains to the south.

Present day Cambodia is found bordered by the Gulf of Siam to the south-west, Laos to the north and Vietnam to the east and south-east. Its main artery is the Mekong valley, which crosses from north to south. This is joined at Phnom Penh by the Tonle Sap, spreading to the north-west in a large plain of water that extends for some 140 kilometres by 30 and irrigates the surrounding plains.

The Tonle Sap - once a maritime gulf that now forms a lake - has the peculiarity that each rainy season, from May to October, its waters are no longer able to flow into the flooding Mekong and become choked, rising by ten metres and so forming a huge regulatory basin, whose surface area triples that of the dry season. Large water festivals with canoe races during November's full moon mark the end of this period, and the King, in a symbolic ritual, presides over the reversing of the current.

Each annual deluge sees the Tonle Sap rise still further, completely flooding the forested zones that border its banks and ensuring a particularly abundant source of nourishment to its fish - so making it the richest fish pond in the world.

Cambodia lies between 10 and 14 degrees latitude north, and the climate nears the equatorial with an almost constant temperature. The contrast between the dry season and the season of the heavy rains is, however, quite marked, and although the average temperature of the year is 28 degrees, the nights of December and January - that are particularly fresh - see the temperature fall to around 20 degrees, while the months of April and May are distinguished by a torrid heat reaching 35 degrees in an atmosphere charged with storms which never break.

Although under the influence of the monsoons, the country is protected from the coast by chains of mountains ranging from 1000 to 1500 metres in height - notably the Elephant mountains, where the Bokor altitude station is located - giving it a less humid and unhealthy climate than Cochinchina. Here the skies are often quite fresh and clear - and extremely favourable to moonlit nights.

With its eight million inhabitants for an area of 180,000 square kilometres, Cambodia is an under-developed country with little cultivation. Thin agricultural resources are complemented with fishing, a little rearing of cattle and some forestry, while a large part of its area is mostly covered with unbroken forest and bush, and remains deserted.

Rice and fish are the staple diet, and the harvest is regulated by the rhythm of the rains and floods. The fish are plentiful - even in the paddy fields where they hibernate in the underground mud during the dry months to re-emerge with the first rains. On the Tonle Sap, during the dry season, entire villages are established on the open lake - their belongings suspended from poles with the racks of drying fish.

The rural Cambodian lives a rudimentary existence, by the water if possible, in straw huts or in wooden houses raised from the ground on posts of two metres in height. He is sheltered from the animals and the floods and keeps his meagre livestock under his home. With just enough work to be able to pay his taxes and support his family he lives preferably in the middle of his small-holding, and, without much of a taste for business, is content to let the Chinese or Vietnamese deal with the surplus produce from his paddy or sugar palm, pigs, chickens or the fruits of his garden.

The extensive crossbreeding over the centuries - the happiest of which has resulted, particularly in the towns, from a mixing with the Chinese - does not appear to have fundamentally changed the nature of the people. Cambodians are broad and muscular (standing on average 1m.65), are brachycephalic and generally dark in colour. The nose is broad, the lips are thick and the eyes straight and fairly narrow. The hair is worn short, even on the women. When they feel that one shows them some interest, they are hospitable and sweet natured.

Sensitive and religious, the family centres its life on the pagoda, where the male youth is obliged to spend some of his time. Generous towards their priests - the innumerable monks whose bright orange robes animate the landscape and to whom subsistence is readily assured - they take every opportunity to venerate the Buddha and gain merit, marking the year with numerous festivals to satisfy a distinct taste for leisure.

The national religion is Buddhism of the Small Vehicle, or Theravada, of the Pali language - which is also practised in Ceylon, Burma, Thailand and Laos. The monastic life here plays the principal role and the popular faith, while rudimentary and sometimes tinted with remains of ancient superstition, is based on the transmigration of the soul and the search for personal salvation through work during the course of an existence in which each action is accounted for in the regulation of the future. After death the body is carried to the pyre, and the cremation ends with either the deposit of the ashes in a small funerary monument (Cedei) or their scattering on sacred ground.

9- Ancient Cambodia

Our knowledge of ancient Cambodia derives from three sources; - the interpretation of the bas-reliefs, the writings of Chinese travellers and the reading of the inscriptions on stone. Nothing remains of the tinted parchment manuscripts, written in chalk, or the latania leaves on which the inscribed characters were blackened with a pad. These essentially perishable records were able to resist neither fire, the humidity nor the termites.

A. THE BAS-RELIEFS

The scenes sculpted on the bas-reliefs - in particular at the Bayon - often show almost exactly, if one has the time to study them closely, a picture of daily rural life that has barely since changed. One can see there the same kinds of dwellings, the same carts or canoes, the same costumes, the same instruments for cultivation, hunting, fishing or for music, the same habits and the same manual trades.

B. THE CHINESE CHRONICLES

The most complete of the Chinese chronicles - and the most descriptive - are those of Tcheou Ta-Kouan who, in 1296, just after the first wars with the Siamese and at the beginning of the period of decadence, accompanied a Sino-Mongole envoy to Angkor. His "Memoirs on the Customs of Cambodia", translated by Paul Pelliot and published in the Bulletin of the École Française d'Extrême-Orient of 1902, give an idea of the conditions of life in Cambodia at the end of the 13th century. He says of the inhabitants:

"The customs common to all the southern barbarians are found throughout Cambodia, whose inhabitants are coarse people, ugly and deeply sunburned. This is true not only of those living in the remote villages of the sea islands, but of the dwellers in centres of population. Only the ladies of the court and the womenfolk of the noble houses are white like jade, their pallor coming from being shuttered away from the strong sunlight.

"Generally speaking, the women, like the men, wear only a strip of cloth, bound round the waist, showing bare breasts of milky whiteness. They fasten their hair in a knot, and go barefoot - even the wives of the King, who are five in number, one of whom dwells in the central palace and one at each of the four cardinal points. As for the concubines and palace girls, I have heard that there are from three to five thousand of them, separated into various categories, though they are seldom seen beyond the palace gates. When a family has a beautiful daughter, no time is lost in sending her to the palace.

"In a lower category are the women who do errands for the palace, of whom there are at least two thousand. They are all married, and live throughout the city. The hair of their forehead is shaved high in the manner of the northern people and a vermilion mark is made here and on each temple. Only these women are allowed entry to the palace, which is forbidden to all of a lesser rank.

"The women of the people knot their hair, but with no hairpin or comb, nor any other adornment of the head. On their arms they wear gold bracelets and on their fingers, rings of gold - a fashion also observed by the palace women and the court ladies. Men and women alike are anointed with perfumes compounded of sandalwood, musk and other essences.

"Worship of the Buddha is universal...".

C. THE INSCRIPTIONS

The epigraphy is less anecdotal in nature and describes the other Cambodia, particularly its history, offering a more serious documentation. Together with the studies in the history of art it has enabled the accurate dating of the monuments.

Inseparable are the names of Barth, Bargaigne, Kern and Aymonier, then of Louis Finot and of Georges Cœdés, all of whom dedicated themselves to their task with an impressive methodology and a rigorous discipline. Due to the number of discoveries their science soon became of major importance.

The earliest known inscriptions date from the 7th century and relate to the central Indian "Saka" era. Later than the Christian era by 78 years, this must have been introduced to the Indian Archipelago and Indo-China by Hindu astronomers.

"From the beginning" - we are told by Mr Cœdés - "they simultaneously used two languages - a scholarly language, Sanskrit, reserved for the genealogy of royalty or dignitaries, for the panegyric of the monuments' foundation or for that of the revered donors - and a common language, Khmer or Cambodian, reserved for the disposition of the foundation and the listing of servants or objects donated to the temple. Sanskrit texts are only written in verse: these are the compositions that the Indians call 'Kavya'".

Sanskrit ceased to be the scholarly language used in Indochina when, towards the 14th and 15th centuries, the Brahmanic and Mahayana (or Large Vehicle) Buddhist religions were replaced by Hinayana (or Small Vehicle) Buddhism, and the language used became Pali, also of Hindu origin. As for the old Khmer, Mr Cœdés remarks that "it differed far less from present day Cambodian than the language of Chanson de Roland differed from French".

The inscriptions were engraved with a burin or etcher's chisel in letters of less than a centimetre in height on steles, on tablets and on the door openings of the sanctuaries. The steles, whose location varied between monuments, generally stood in a special shelter, either as rectangular slabs with two inscribed faces or as bornes with four sides, in a hard, polished stone and fixed to the ground or to a base by means of a tenon. Many were found in open countryside.

The text on the jambs of the door openings often covered most of their surface. Towards the end of the classic period it became usual to recount in one or many lines the setting of a statue - a god or a divinity - in the sanctuary, either in reserving a smooth place in the decorative surface of the stone or in scraping a patch clear: this is also true for the identification of certain scenes in the bas-reliefs. Finally, on many of the blocks, roughly inscribed characters can be seen which must have been made by the masons.

 10 - Chronology of the Monuments

A. BY EPIGRAPHY

It is now known that the oldest remains of Khmer architecture so far discovered date from the 6th century AD, and that the constituent monuments of the Angkor group followed one another without interruption from the end of the 9th century to the beginning of the 13th. Epigraphic evidence has enabled Cœdés to accurately order this short period of less than four centuries as follows:

These dates, which are those of the foundation or inauguration, do not, however, imply that each of these temples was built in a single procedure. Monuments such as Ta Prohm, Prah Khan or the Bayon, for example, show unmistakable signs of alterations or additions which deny them any quality of absolute unity.

It remains nonetheless that we have a solid chronological foundation which, by analogy, provides the framework for a general classification based on the natural evolution of architectural motifs and decoration.

Until 1923 the Bayon was considered as a Shivaïte temple and amongst the oldest, following an erroneous interpretation of the inscription of Sdok Kak Thom - which names the monument raised by king Yasovarman, at the end of the 9th century in the middle of his capital Yasodharapura, as the "Central Mountain". This was mistakenly thought to be the Bayon centred within Angkor Thom.

The theory, for a long time held as fact, was to be contested by Louis Finot, supported by the discovery that the monument was in fact Buddhist. Some controversy followed, successively leading Mr. Philippe Stern - associate conservator of the Musée Guimet - to place the Bayon, based mainly on a study of the different styles, in the first half of the 11th century - and then Georges Cœdés, through epigraphic research, to attribute the foundation to king Jayavarman VII at the end of the 12th century. This revelation in 1928 rejuvenated the Bayon by three centuries, revolutionised the understanding of its chronology - attributing its faults no longer to the explorative beginnings of Khmer art but rather to the flagging discipline of the decadent period - and also shattered a number of architectural, decorative and religious anomalies. Today the new theory can be considered as generally accepted and apparently definitive.

It was Mr. Victor Goloubew who brought the discussion to a decisive conclusion with his meticulous research into the succession of the capitals. By keen intuition he ceased looking for the "Central Mountain" of the inscription inside Angkor Thom and instead focused his attention on the Shivaïte "temple-mountain" of Phnom Bakheng, constructed just to the south on a natural hill. Excavations from 1931 to 1934 revealed the remains of enclosure walls, of gopuras, of grand axial roads and of symmetrically arranged pools - all framed within a double levee of earth forming a quadrilateral that is still quite visible in the landscape. The location of the first Angkor was therefore determined to be quite independent of Angkor Thom and the Bayon of Jayavarman VII.

Other excavations, undertaken in 1936, have enabled Mr. Goloubew to suggest to accurately order this short period of less than four centuries as follows:

These dates, which are those of the foundation or inauguration, do not, however, imply that each of these temples was built in a single procedure. Monuments such as Ta Prohm, Prah Khan or the Bayon, for example, show unmistakable signs of alterations or additions which deny them any quality of absolute unity.

It remains nonetheless that we have a solid chronological foundation which, by analogy, provides the framework for a general classification based on the natural evolution of architectural motifs and decoration.

Until 1923 the Bayon was considered as a Shivaïte temple and amongst the oldest, following an erroneous interpretation of the inscription of Sdok Kak Thom - which names the monument raised by king Yasovarman, at the end of the 9th century in the middle of his capital Yasodharapura, as the "Central Mountain". This was mistakenly thought to be the Bayon centred within Angkor Thom.

The theory, for a long time held as fact, was to be contested by Louis Finot, supported by the discovery that the monument was in fact Buddhist. Some controversy followed, successively leading Mr Philippe Stern - associate conservator of the Musée Guimet - to place the Bayon, based mainly on a study of the different styles, in the first half of the 11th century - and then Georges Cœdés, through epigraphic research, to attribute the foundation to king Jayavarman VII at the end of the 12th century. This revelation in 1928 rejuvenated the Bayon by three centuries, revolutionised the understanding of its chronology - attributing its faults no longer to the explorative beginnings of Khmer art but rather to the flagging discipline of the decadent period - and also shattered a number of architectural, decorative and religious anomalies. Today the new theory can be considered as generally accepted and apparently definitive.

It was Mr. Victor Goloubew who brought the discussion to a decisive conclusion with his meticulous research into the succession of the capitals. By keen intuition he ceased looking for the "Central Mountain" of the inscription inside Angkor Thom and instead focused his attention on the Shivaïte "temple-mountain" of Phnom Bakheng, constructed just to the south on a natural hill. Excavations from 1931 to 1934 revealed the remains of enclosure walls, of gopuras, of grand axial roads and of symmetrically arranged pools - all framed within a double levee of earth forming a quadrilateral that is still quite visible in the landscape. The location of the first Angkor was therefore determined to be quite independent of Angkor Thom and the Bayon of Jayavarman VII.

Other excavations, undertaken in 1936, have enabled Mr Goloubew to suggest the existence of another intermediate capital, dating perhaps from the 11th century and centred on Phimeanakas or the Baphuon - or else on the first site of the Bayon. It would have had moats at its limits, lined with laterite steps, between two levees of earth formed at a hundred metres within the line of the future ramparts of Angkor Thom. Other canals have been found on either side of the principal axial roads as well as the remains of gates and drainage channels, confirming again the particular importance that hydraulic works had for the ancient Khmer, for whom water constituted such a vital element.

B. CHRONOLOGY BY STYLE

The work of Philippe Stern and Mme de Coral-Remusat gives us a method of classification for the monuments based on their grouping by styles, resulting from the analytical study of their decorative themes.

Though normally one should be cautious, since changes in the natural evolution of any art can be induced by external influences, reversion to archaism or perhaps the sculptor tempted by innovation - it would seem that in this instance, however, such methodology carries the maximum guarantee of accuracy, since the Khmer artist was not able to, as it were, give free rein to his imagination or fantasy.

Conducting their research in close relationship with the dates determined by epigraphy, our art historians applied their methods to monuments that are in fact already fixed with some precision in time - these markers serving as a control, within a kind of framework, for the careful study of the various elements of the ornamentation; - colonnettes and lintels, pilasters and frontons, the bas-reliefs and sculpture in the round. "When the decoration of one or more of the monuments" - we are told by Mme. de Coral-Remusat - "shows characteristics identical to those in the decoration of a structure that is placed in time, one has the right to conclude that the monument or monuments in question are approximately contemporaneous with this structure - they are clearly earlier if their decoration is less evolved, and later if it is more so".

The filiation of the monuments so established by Mr. Philippe Stern and Mme. de Coral-Remusat is described in the following table: