The Kingdom's Memory: A Guide to the Stone Inscriptions of Cambodia

The Kingdom's Memory: A Guide to the Stone Inscriptions of Cambodia
Chapter One: The First Voices: The Oldest Khmer Inscriptions and What They Reveal The story of Cambodian history, as opposed to its deeper prehistory, begins with the written word. It begins at the moment the early Khmer people, having adopted the art of writing from India, began to carve their language into the most permanent medium available to them: stone. These ancient inscriptions, or silalek (សិលាចារឹក), are the first, authentic voices to speak to us directly from the pre-Angkorian world. They are not grand chronicles of kings and battles, but they are something far more valuable. They are a window into the daily life, the legal system, the religious devotion, and the social structure of a sophisticated civilization that was already flourishing long before the first great temples of Angkor were ever conceived. The Earliest Traces: Sanskrit on Stone The very earliest inscriptions found in the region of ancient Cambodia, dating from the 4th to the 6th centuries during the Funan perio…