Chapter2: CAMBODIA BEFORE ANGkOR
For most people,
the ancient city f Angkor is synonymous with Cambodia but the Angkorean Empire
dates only from 802 AD, when king Jayavarman 11 moved upstream from the Mekong
Valley to found a new capital on higher ground near the north western tip of
the Great Lake, the Tonle Sap. The country however was inhabited long before
that. Stone Age remains indicate human presence in what we now call Cambodia
for tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years. We cannot say if these
people were the distant ancestors of the present day Khmers, but it does seem
that the Khmer Mon people settled in the area between Burma and the South China
Sea some time before the third millen nium BC, after migrating from the north.
For most of this gulf of unrecorded time, the inhabitants were hunter
gatherers, nomads who roamed the forests and marshlands in search of game and
vegetable foods. It is likely also that others practiced swidded, or slash and
burn farming, much as the Khmer loeu tribes or hill peoples still do today
cutting and burning clearings in the forest and growing crops for a year so
before moving on when the soil is exhausted.
There is archaeological evidence to show that some of these nomads began
a more settled, agriculturally based existence around 3000BC, particularly east
of the Mekong near the present day settle –ments Chup and Snuol. At some stage
during this process, rudimentary state societies must have replaced the
primitive communism of these people’s ancestors, which if like the simple
societies of the hill peoples today was based around a collective, non –state
way of life. The early sedentary people used copper and bronze tools, in
sophisticated social systems made possible by the creation of a social surplus
product based of efficient agriculture and animal husbandry.
It is highly unlikely that there was any single unified state during this
period; probably there were numerous petty principalities, ruled over by local
chieftains, of Pons. It might be tempting to impose the idea of Cambodia on to
the distant past, but all the evidence indicates that there was on unitary
Cambodian state until after the foundation of Angkor at the beginning of the
ninth century AD. Moreover, there is no hard evidence to prove that these early
inhabitants were Khmers at all it is not until the seventh century AD that
stone inscriptions in the Khmer language began to occur. It is entirely
possible that the inhabitants of the early settlements were ancestors of the
modern Chams, or of some other people who might have died out or been pushed
out by later settlers. After all, by way of comparison, until the fifth century
AD, with the onset of the Dark Age and the Saxon invasions, the inhabitants of
what is today England were Romanized Celts, the ancestors not of the modern
English but of the Welsh and Cornish.
Ancient Funan
Whoever
they were, by the beginning of the first century AD. The inhabitants of Cambodia
had achieved a high level of civilization, influenced by the culture of India.
One polity (or perhaps group of polities), known to us as Funan, has left an
extensive record of its existence and way of life. The pre Angkor scholar
Michael Vickery had warned against assuming that Funan was a unified state—it
is possible that it was a loose alliance of port towns in the lower Mekong
delta. However, the existence of large canals suggests a strong state power
capable of planning and managing the large numbers of labourers required for
such projects. Such workforces would have depended of regular food supplies,
produced by efficient agriculture and tax collection system. On the other hand,
we know that the city states of Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy were
capable of building public works and large monuments without direction by
overarching national or supra national polities, so Vickery is probably right
about pre Angkorean Cambodia.
The Chinese chroniclers claim that the first king of Funan was a man
called Fan Shih Man, but we have no way of telling whether that was his real
name or if indeed he was the first king, or if he ruled over a much greater
territory than the other Pons or petty chieftains of the time. The name Fan
Shih man bears no relation to any of the South East Asian languages; it is a
Chinese corruption of an indigenous name, but the question is, a corruption of
what? The American scholar Lawrence Palmer Briggs believed that ‘Fan’ might
have been a corruption of the Sanskrit suffix ‘Varman’, which means protector,
and which was appended to the names of many subsequent kings and petty kings in
Cambodia. Michael Vickery argues more plausibly that, ‘Fan is a corruption of
the Khmer Mon Pon, which died out before Angkor.
Again, we have no way of knowing the
ethnicity of the inhabitants of Funan although of Vickery is right in his
speculation about the origins of words such as pon, perhaps we might call them
proto Khmers. What language they spoke in everyday life we do not know.
Although Funan was a literate, Indianised society, all trace of the book in
what the Chinese described as impressive libraries have disappeared in the heat
and humidity and all stone inscriptions from before the seventh century are in
Sanskrit. Indeed, we have no way of knowing even what the Funanese called
themselves; Funan itself is a Chinese word, and although scholars have
suggested it might be a corruption of the Khmer word phnom, this will remain
speculation unless further evidence cones to light. On the other hand Khmer
folklore has it that the Cambodian people built a town at Angkor Borei, in the
Mekong delta, around the time of Funan. However, folklore cannot put precise
dates on paces and events and there is no evidence to support the existence of
Khmer speakers in the lower delta until the seventh century (although this does
not mean that they did not exist).
What we do know of Funan comes from
three sources: Chinese dynastic chronicles, Sanskrit stone inscriptions and the
archaeological record. The earliest account of the kingdom in contained in the
history of the Chin Dynasty, from 265—419 AD. Its reliability is a matter of
debate, given that the writers often wrote hundreds of year after the events
they were describing and on the basis of hearsay and second-hand reports.
Nevertheless, the chronicles do give us some tantalizing details of a long-gone
civilization. They tell us that the common people originally went naked, even
in the streets of their towns, and that they were ugly black and fuzzy haired’
---a common (and unfair) criticism by the ethnocentric Chinese, who valued
light skin colouring and spurned the barbarians of the tropical lands.
Puzzlingly, the Funanese are also described
as being peaceful yet warlike, honest yet cunning. Probably, like human
being in general, they were a mixture of traits, although the discrepancies
perhaps point to multiple authors, poor editing or muddled data available to
the writers.
The Funanese , unlik its authority the later Khmers, appear to have been keen
seafarers, trading with India and China and sending tribute to the Chinese
emperors. If Funan were a unitary state its capital is not known, with
conflicting claims made by modern writers for Vyadhapura, Angkor Borei, Banteay
Prei Nokor and even Prey Veng, all situated in the Mekong delta or reasonably
close to it. Another Funanese centre, the port town of Oc Eo in what in today
called the Camay peninsula, was excavated by the French archaeologist Louis Malleret
before World War II.
Or Eo was laid out geometrically
which suggests that it was planned---again by a strong state power, however
limited the extent of might have been. The found of some brick buildings
remain; stone is rarely found in the alluvium of the delta and the wooden or
bamboo houses of the common people have long since disappeared. The brick buildings’
were probably temples and /or mausoleums, but they are of a simple design and d
not appears to have housed bas-reliefs (stone friezes) as in the later temples
of Angkor. One intriguing building at Oc Eo was a square brick structure,
called Edifice A’ by malleret. He speculated that perhaps it was a tower of
silence similar to the raised platforms on which the Parsees of India to this
day leave out their dead for consumption by vultures. Other writers have
disputed this, noting Chinese accounts that the Funanese dead were cast into
the delta waters and presumably eaten by the crocodiles.
As elsewhere in Cambodia further
exploration of archaeological sites was interrupted by the subsequent decades
of war domestic upheaval and international isolation. It is likely that what we
know of Funan will be greatly enhanced by the correct word of the lower Mekong
Archaeological Project (LOMAP) coordinated by the University of Hawii
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