The Angkor Borei Inscription K. 557/600 from Cambodia: An English translation and commentary

 
PIIS086919080003960-3-1
DOI10.31857/S086919080003960-3
Publication type Article
Status Published
Authors
Affiliation:
Leading Research Fellow, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences
Professor, Moscow State University of Psychology and Education
Address: Russian Federation, Moscow
Journal nameVostok. Afro-Aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost
EditionIssue 1
Pages66-80
Abstract

The author offers the first complete English translation of the Old Khmer inscription K.557/600 from Angkor Borei, which dates from 611 CE. It is the earliest dated inscription of Cambodia known today. This source was first published by George Cœdès in 1942. He translated the inscription into French but omitted the names of servants. Since his edition there has been no attempt to produce the full translation, except the Russian translation by Anton O. Zakharov in 2016. The inscription sheds light on the ancient Khmer personal names and sobriquets. Namesofservants or ‘slaves,’ whowere granted to various gods, i.e. religious foundations, by various donators, were of Sanskrit, Old Khmer, Austronesian, and Austroasiatic origin. But servants who bore these names or sobriquets played similar social roles. Thus, names of different origin were not indicators of different social status.

KeywordsCambodia, inscriptions, epigraphy, personal names, servants, donations, slaves, Angkor Borei
AcknowledgmentThe Russian translation of the inscription can be found in (Zakharov 2016).
Received20.03.2019
Publication date21.03.2019
Number of characters43687
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1 The early seventh century CE was in some way a dawn of the new era in the history of Cambodia. The beginning of the century saw the first dated inscriptions in vernacular Old Khmer language. These texts supplanted step-by-step local Sanskrit epigraphy. However, Sanskrit had continued in the dating formulae, royal names and eulogies placed inside the Old Khmer texts1. 1. According to scholarly convention, the inscriptions of Cambodia are designated by the letter K whereas the inscriptions of Campā in Central Vietnam by the letter C since the catalogues of George Cœdès (Cœdès 1908: 37–92; Cœdès, Parmentier 1923; Cœdès. 1937; 1942; 1966).
2 The earliest dated inscription of Cambodia K. 557/600 was found on an elevation Vằt Črôy on the right riverbank of the Angkor Borei River where an ancient urban site of the same name has been excavated by an American excavation team of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa under the direction of Miriam Stark (2003; 2004; 2006a–d) (see fig. 1). The inscription is dated from 611 CE. It is written in Old Khmer with Sanskrit loan-words and engraved in the Early Pallava script–a kind of Brahmi script.
3 The text is engraved on the three surfaces of a square stone whose height is 0.80 m and whose breadth is 1.20 m. The southern part of the inscription contains three lines. They were published as the Touol Vat Komnou inscription K. 557 in the Volume 5 of the six-volume Inscriptions du Cambodge (Finot 1935, pl. XIII)2. The northern and eastern parts of the inscription were deciphered and translated into French by George Cœdès (1886–1969, 1942: 21–23) as K. 600. His translation is incomplete. He omitted all the names of dependent persons, or “slaves” (esclaves). The Indian historian Ramesh Chandra Majumdar (1888–1980) in his Inscriptions of Kambuja described the content of the inscription following Cœdès (Majumdar 1953: 7–8, 559–560, No. 6)3. The American linguist Philipp Jenner published a drawing of the inscription’s part with his commentaries in his A Chrestomathy of Pre-Angkorian Khmer: Dated Inscriptions from the Seventh and Eighth Centuries (Jenner 1980: 1–9). Michael Vickery did analyze some terms and fragments of the inscription K. 557/600 in his colossal Society, Economics, and Politics in PreAngkor Cambodia: The 7th–8th Centuries (Vickery 1998). 2. It should be emphasized that the well-illustrated six-volume Inscriptions du Cambodge have the same title that the seminal eight-volume edition by George Cœdès. His edition has no pictures whereas the six-volume edition offers no transliteration and no translation. On the contrary, Cœdès did translate a huge amount of Cambodian Old Khmer inscriptions.

3. It should be stressed that Majumdar offers an English-language compilation of previous French scholarship. He gives Sanskrit parts of the Cambodian inscriptions in Devanagari script and describes its contents very briefly. Due to these weaknesses, contemporary scholars have rarely mentioned Majumdar’s book. Michael Vickery (1931–2017), for instance, does not mention it at all (Vickery 1998).
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Fig. 1: A map of Pre-Angkorian Cambodia. From (Stark 2003, 89, map III–1).

5 Jenner rather ironically states that “The analysis of slave lists can be rewarding if one has the stomach for it” (Jenner 1980: 7)4. He adds that the personal names in the inscription are of Sanskrit, Old Khmer and other languages’ origin. The most reliable markers of the personal name, in Jenner’s view, are words va/ ‘a man’ and ku ‘a woman’. These markers occur immediately before the name or sobriquet. I would add that the inscription K. 557/600 contains an Austronesian and an Austroasiatic name, Putiḥ and Lavo respectively. 4. The Russian scholar Dega V. Deopik attempted to apply statistical methods to ancient Khmer personal names from the Old Khmer inscriptions (1969; 1972; 1975; 1979; 1983) but his works contain the lists and pure numerical data only, without providing interpretation.
6 In 1977 Long Seam, a Khmer PhD student at the Institute of Asian and African Studies of the Lomonosov Moscow State University who worked under supervision of Deopik, published a paper on the personal names of pre-Angkorian and Angkorian Cambodia (1977: 111–119). He summarized data from more than one thousand inscriptions. He described the structure, morphology and semantics of Old Khmer personal names. Later Long Seam published a study of Khmer geographic names (1993: 127–147).
7 Some Old Khmer personal names may have been sobriquets due to their meaning5. The inscription K. 557/600 mentions certain Klapit ‘to be fettered, confined’, Laṅsoṅ ‘one who has received retribution’, Sa’uy ‘To smell bad, stink, reek; stinker’, Cke ‘dog’6, Santos ‘spit’, Ragāl ‘diminished, reduced’, Rapak ‘broken, ruined’, Cmā ‘cat’, Tvin ‘twisted, bent, deformed’, Knāy ‘device for scraping, grubbing’, Crañ ‘bristle’, Tvoc ‘small, little’, Adās ‘opponent, rival’, Asaru ‘ bad, evil, ill-disposed’, Vaḥ ‘aged (lit. parted of her youth)’, Knur ‘leprous (?)’, etc. 5. I am grateful to Mark Yu. Ulyanov for that idea.

6. Long Seam points out that Old Khmer “names of animals were used to denote personal names of lower social classes (Catégorie sociale inférieure)” (Long Seam 1977: 118).
8 Sanskrit personal names in Old Khmer inscriptions are always harmonious but their bearers carried out the same functions as those who had Old Khmer names and/or sobriquets. For example, the inscription K. 557/600 mentions house-serfs Śivadāsa (Skr. ‘a slave of Shiva’) and Sa’uy (Old Khmer ‘a stinker’), rice-fields workers Jyeṣṭhahvarmma (Skr. ‘the best protector’) and Aras (Old Khmer ‘living, live’), female dancers Tanvaṅgī (Skr. ‘slender’) and Pit ' (Old Khmer ‘sealed by me (?)’).
9 The date of the inscription occupies the first line of its northern part: traitrīśottarapañcaśata śakaparigra[ha] trayodaśī ket māgha puṣyanakṣatra tulalagna “In the Śaka year 533, thirteenth day of the waxing moon of the month Māgha (January–February), when the lunar mansion was Puṣya (the sixth lunar mansion), and the Sun entered Libra”. The Sanskrit part contains few inaccuracies. It gives traitrīśottara instead of trayastriṃśa + uttara. It uses no cases. It also makes use of the Old Khmer word ket instead of Skr. śuklapakṣa ‘waxing Moon’.
10 The transition to Old Khmer in epigraphy looks a bit sudden due to the fact that all earlier inscriptions dated from the sixth century CE are composed in Sanskrit only7. They include multiple records of the king Citrasena-Mahendravarman: fragmentary К. 377 from Vat Sumphon in Surin (Cœdès 1953: 3–4), К. 509 from Tham Prasat in Ubon (Cœdès apud Seidenfaden 1922: 57–60), both in Thailand; К. 116 from Kruoi Ampil in the Stung Treng Province of Cambodia (Cœdès 1942: 134); К. 122 from Thma Kre in the Kratie Province (Finot 1903: 212); К. 514 from Tham Pet Thong in the Nakhon Ratchasima, or Khorat Province, Thailand (Seidenfaden 1922: 92); К. 363 from Phu Lokhon in the Basak Province of Laos (Barth 1903: 442–446)8 ; К. 496–497 from Pak Mun or Khan Thevada (Cœdès apud Seidenfaden 1922: 57–60); К. 508 from Tham Prasat, or Tham Phu Ma Nay in the Ubon Province of Thailand9; К. 1102 from Khon Kaen and К. 1106 from Phimai (Vickery 1998: 74–75); К. 969 from Khau Sra Cheng, or Ta Phraya in Thailand (Cœdès 1964: 152; Chhabra 1961: 109). Other examples are the inscription К. 213 from Phnom Banteay Neang in the Battambang Province of Cambodia issued by the king Bhavavarman who was elder brother of CitrasenaMahendravarman (Barth 1885: 26–28), and the inscription К. 359 from Veal Kantel in the Stung Treng Province of Cambodia. The K. 359 inscription mentions a nephew of female line of Bhavavarman named Hiraṇyavarman and the latter’s father Somaśarman (Barth 1885: 28– 31). 7. The inscriptions of Funan are also written in Sanskrit. They date from the fifth – early sixth centuries as well as the Sanskrit inscription of a certain king Devānīka who ruled in the region of Vat Phou (modern Laos). See Cœdès 1931; 1937b; Zakharov 2015a: 1–23; 2015b: 170–177; 2014: 142–148.

8. Cœdès calls its find-place Čăn Năk‘ôn (1966: 138).

9. «Chronique de l’année», BEFEO 22 (1922), p. 385, section « Laos » ;Cœdès 1931, pl. I. While the Sanskrit root -śarman occurs unfrequently in royal names, it is synonymous of the root –varman: they both mean ‘a protector’ (Monier-Williams 1899: 926, 1058).

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Additional sources and materials

Fig. 1: A map of Pre-Angkorian Cambodia. From (Stark 2003, 89, map III-1). 

Fig. 2: The inscription К. 557/600 611 CE from Angkor Borei: The Northern Part: Print n. 1054-N K. 600. Courtesy: École française d’Extrême-Orient. 

Fig. 3: The inscription К. 557/600 611 CE from Angkor Borei: The Eastern Part: Print n. 1054-E K. 600. Courtesy: École française d’Extrême-Orient. 

Fig. 4: The inscription К. 557/600 611 CE from Angkor Borei: The Southern Part: Print n. 1054-S K. 557/600. Courtesy: École française d’Extrême-Orient.

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