Founding of the Khmer Empire: Jayavarman II in 802

The founding of the Khmer Empire is traditionally dated to 802, when Jayavarman II was consecrated as chakravartin, or universal monarch, on the sacred mountain of Mahendraparvata, today’s Phnom Kulen in Cambodia. The ritual proclaimed the independence of the Khmer lands from a power called “Java” and created a royal cult that later kings would maintain for centuries. From this beginning grew the Angkorian state, which dominated mainland Southeast Asia until the fifteenth century.

Background: Cambodia before Angkor

The Khmer, ancestors of today’s Cambodians, had built states in the lower Mekong basin long before the ninth century. Chinese sources describe a kingdom they called Funan, based on trade along the coast, from around the first to the sixth centuries. It was followed by Chenla, a name the Chinese gave to Khmer kingdoms further inland from the late sixth century.

By the eighth century Chenla had broken up. Chinese records speak of a “Land Chenla” in the north and a “Water Chenla” in the south, but in reality there were many small rival principalities, each ruled by local lords. Khmer inscriptions in Sanskrit and Old Khmer record temple foundations and land grants, but no single ruler controlled the whole region.

Indian religious ideas had shaped the Khmer world for centuries. Kings took Sanskrit names ending in “-varman” (protector), worshipped Shiva and Vishnu, and employed Brahmin priests to perform rituals of kingship.

The key source: the Sdok Kok Thom inscription

Almost everything known about the events of 802 comes from one inscription, written more than 250 years later. The Sdok Kok Thom stele, carved in 1052 and found at a temple in present-day Sa Kaeo province, Thailand, records the history of a family of priests who served the Khmer kings.

The family traced its role back to Shivakaivalya, the chaplain of Jayavarman II. According to the inscription, Jayavarman came “from Java” to rule the Khmer land. He moved his residence several times, and on Mahendraparvata he invited a learned Brahmin, Hiranyadama, to perform a ceremony so that the country would no longer be dependent on Java and there would be one universal monarch. Hiranyadama taught Shivakaivalya the sacred texts of the rite, and the priest’s descendants were to serve the royal cult for ever after.

Because the inscription was written much later by a family with an interest in emphasising its own importance, historians treat its details with care. Even the year 802 is a modern deduction rather than a date stated in the text, though it remains the standard date for the founding of the Angkorian state.

Who was Jayavarman II?

Very little is certain about Jayavarman II’s origins. No inscription survives from his own reign, so his life is known only from later accounts. He seems to have belonged to a Khmer princely family, and his earliest activities are placed in the south-east of present-day Cambodia.

The meaning of “Java” in the Sdok Kok Thom inscription has been debated for a century. It may refer to the island of Java and its Sailendra kings, or to a Malay maritime power such as Srivijaya, which then had influence over much of the region. Some scholars suggest it referred to the Cham kingdom on the coast of present-day Vietnam. The inscription does not say whether Jayavarman had been held at a foreign court, as some modern accounts assume.

What is clearer is that he spent years campaigning to bring rival Khmer lords under his control. Later inscriptions say he ruled successively from several capitals: Indrapura, probably in the east of Cambodia; Kuti; Hariharalaya, near today’s Roluos; Amarendrapura; and Mahendraparvata. Each move seems to reflect a stage in his expansion towards the north-west, around the great lake of the Tonle Sap.

The consecration on Phnom Kulen

Phnom Kulen is a sandstone plateau about 40 kilometres north-east of Angkor. It is the source of the Siem Reap River and was considered sacred; its name in the inscriptions, Mahendraparvata, means “mountain of the great Indra”. Later Khmer temples were built with sandstone quarried from its slopes.

There, according to the Sdok Kok Thom stele, Hiranyadama performed the ritual that established the cult called kamraten jagat ta raja in Khmer, translated into Sanskrit as devaraja. The ceremony made Jayavarman a chakravartin, a universal ruler in Indian political thought, and symbolically freed the land from foreign overlordship.

What the devaraja actually was remains disputed. Early twentieth-century scholars understood it as a “god-king” cult in which the king himself was worshipped as a god. Many historians now believe the phrase meant “king of the gods”, most likely Shiva in the form of a sacred image that protected the realm and travelled with the court. The king was linked to the god, but not necessarily identified with him.

The lost city of Mahendraparvata

For a long time Mahendraparvata was known only from inscriptions and scattered temple ruins in the Kulen forest. In 2012 an airborne laser scanning (lidar) survey, led by the archaeologists Damian Evans and Jean-Baptiste Chevance, saw through the tree cover and revealed a grid of roads, embankments, ponds and temple foundations across the plateau.

The results, published in 2013, showed that Mahendraparvata had been a substantial planned settlement, not just a mountain sanctuary. A large stepped pyramid on the plateau, known as Rong Chen, has been suggested as a possible setting for the consecration ceremony, though this cannot be proved.

After 802: from Hariharalaya to Angkor

Jayavarman II did not stay on Kulen. He returned to Hariharalaya, on the plain south-east of present-day Siem Reap, where he died around 835. Older books give 850, based on earlier readings of the inscriptions. After death he received the posthumous name Parameshvara, “supreme lord”, a name of Shiva.

His successors built on his foundation. Indravarman I, who came to the throne in 877, made Hariharalaya a grand capital, building the temple of Preah Ko (879), the temple-mountain of Bakong (881) and a large reservoir. His son Yasovarman I founded a new capital, Yasodharapura, around the hill of Phnom Bakheng in about 900. This was the first city at Angkor, the area that would remain the heart of the empire for more than five centuries.

Consequences

The events associated with 802 marked the beginning of a single, centralised Khmer kingdom. Later kings regarded Jayavarman II as the founder of their line, whether or not they were his descendants, and the priestly families of the devaraja cult remained important at court for generations.

The new state also rested on rice. The plain north of the Tonle Sap, watered by rivers flowing from the Kulen hills and by the lake’s annual flood, could support a large population. Jayavarman II’s successors invested heavily in water management, building great rectangular reservoirs, known as barays, together with canals and embankments. Indravarman I’s reservoir at Hariharalaya was the first of these on a monumental scale, and later kings at Angkor built even larger ones. Archaeologists still debate how far these works served irrigation and how far they were religious and symbolic, but they show the resources a united Khmer kingdom could command.

The model of kingship he established, combining military power, Indian ritual and the patronage of great temples, became the template for Angkor. At its height in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the empire controlled much of present-day Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and southern Vietnam, and produced monuments such as Angkor Wat.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Jayavarman II’s reign began in 802 and ended in 850. Fact: These dates come from older scholarship; most historians now think his career ran from roughly 770–790 to about 835.
• Myth: The devaraja cult made the Khmer king a living god. Fact: The term is now often understood as referring to a protective deity, probably Shiva, rather than worship of the king himself.
• Myth: We have Jayavarman II’s own record of his reign. Fact: No inscription of his own survives; the main account was written in 1052.

Timeline

• c. 770–790: Jayavarman II begins campaigns in the south and east of present-day Cambodia.
• 802: Consecration as universal monarch on Mahendraparvata (Phnom Kulen), by the conventional dating.
• c. 835: Jayavarman II dies at Hariharalaya and receives the posthumous name Parameshvara.
• 877: Indravarman I comes to the throne and enlarges Hariharalaya.
• 881: Dedication of the Bakong temple-mountain.
• c. 900: Yasovarman I founds Yasodharapura, the first capital at Angkor.
• 1052: The Sdok Kok Thom inscription records the events of Jayavarman II’s reign.
• 2012: A lidar survey reveals the remains of Mahendraparvata on the Kulen plateau.

Legacy

Phnom Kulen remains a place of pilgrimage for Cambodians, with shrines, a reclining Buddha and carvings in the bed of the river. The founding ritual of 802 is still treated in Cambodia as the birth of the Angkorian state, the period that modern Cambodia regards as its classical age.

The empire Jayavarman II founded faced many challenges, including the Cham sack of Angkor in 1177, and it finally declined after its capital was abandoned in the fifteenth century, an episode covered in Fall of Angkor (1431).

Why it matters

The consecration of Jayavarman II marks the point at which scattered Khmer principalities became a single kingdom with a powerful ideology of kingship. That kingdom produced Angkor, one of the largest pre-industrial urban complexes in the world, and shaped the history of mainland Southeast Asia for more than six centuries.