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The impetus behind his drive for Khmer culture power was thus the desire to copy the Shailendra pattern of magnificent dynastic power, supported by a strong religious cult expressed through all the resources of art. One of his most significant acts of the Khmer ruler during his campaign was to establish in 802 one of his successive capitals at Mahendraparvata on Phnom Kulen, about twenty miles from Angkor. He did not stay there long, for the site was unsuitable for a capital. It was a mountain, however, and its name means 'the mountain of the great King of the Gods'.

The Shailendra dynasty claimed the title 'Mountain Kings', and Jayavarman clearly

wished to demonstrate that he, too, was heir to this title by literally living on a sacred Cambodian mountain.

Like great monuments of Javanese art, the later Khmer classic monuments were intended to convey the image of the sacred mountain, on whose summit dwelt the king's divinity, in intimate communion with the gods, himself as one of them. Jayavarman also established the basic royal cult of the Khmers.

He summoned a Brahmin learned in the appropriate texts, and erected a lingam (phallic emblem, sacred to Shiva) with all the correct Indian ritual. This lingam, in which the king's own soul was held to reside, became the source and centre of power for the Khmer dynasty.

At the same time and by that act he severed all ties of dependence upon Indonesia. Jayavarman died in 850, and was succeeded by his son Jayavarman III, who ruled until 877. One of Jayavarman II's Khmer capitals was at Sambor.

The Khmer temple he built with their sculptures there seem to have amounted to a revival of the old Chen La style. At Banteay Prei Nokar and Roluos (where he died) he also had old style temples constructed. But on Phnom Kulen, where the sacred Khmer lingam was set up, he seems to have ordered the first attempt to imitate the cosmic mountain in the form of the brick pyramid of his temple.

In about AD 800 at another of his Khmer capitals, Amarendrapura, he seems to have made a three-tiered brick pyramid crowned by a group of five shrines, dominating the plain. Even here the Khmer shrine architecture represents a continuation of the old Chen La pattern of tiers of diminishing repeats of the basic cell. But in the elaborate sculptured ornament of his temples Jayavarman made a radical departure.

He evidently called on artists from both Java and Champa to assist in or supervise the work of the Kulen. A form of makara head vomiting a deer comes from Champa, as does the style and type of the pediment relief.

A Javanese form of the head of the kala monster is used. But the larger icon-figures made for Jayavarman III continue the native Cambodian or Khmer culture traditions, somewhat stylized, perhaps. Khmer, Chinese and Cambodia.

The Khmer Vishnu figures gradually dispense with the solid aureole supporting the arms. They show the Prasat Andet forehead-peak, but their eyebrows gradually lose their clear bows and condense into a single continuous line.

Under Jayavarman the Khmer culture main lines of its inspiration had been laid down.
The real emergence of Khmer art began under Indravarman (877-89). This Khmer king is represented in the inscriptions he commissioned as a scholar as well as a successful Khmer ruler.

He claims to have studied the monistic Vedanta philosophy of the great Indian Shankaracharya, with a Brahmin learned in that tradition. He pacified the Khmer kingdom and his authority seems to have been recognized in the most distant parts of Southeast Asia. But the achievement for which he is remembered today is his laying of the foundations of Angkor.

Angkor is often called a city. In a sense it was. But at the same time it was more than a Khmer city, for its basis is an immense technological achievement. Whereas cities generally live off an already established agricultural prosperity, Angkor was originally designed to create its own prosperous agriculture.

The land around Angkor is not well watered naturally. Its rivers flow violently during the monsoon season. But during the dry season, when the monsoon rain-water is gone, the surrounding Cambodian plains suffer from severe drought.

Angkor was a capital of the Khmer culture with ancient Angkor Wat as the center, filled with Khmer temples and supporting many inhabitants. But its nucleus was a splendid Cambodian irrigation project, based on a number of huge artificial reservoirs fed by the local rivers and linked to each other by means of a rectangular grid system of canals. These Cambodian reservoirs, called barays, were located at the highest point in the river system, and were used to feed a vast chain of irrigation channels spreading out over the lower lying land.

The Khmer temples and palaces are thus both an expression of that reverence and at the same time an essential part of the mechanism. The continual gift of the waters of heaven, divine by origin, is ensured by continual Khmer royal intercession, and by the performance of correct ceremonial.

In this the Khmer king, who was the earthly image of God, his Brahmins and later on Buddhist monks, played an essential part. The Khmer king believed himself to be united with the deity of his cult after his death, and statues were set up in his chief temple to commemorate the divinization of the king.

Indravarman built the first colossal baray at Angkor, and laid down the basis for the irrigation system. The idea was perhaps an expansion of the concept of irrigation by means of the reservoir, used by the Chen La people.

The Khmer engineering involved at Angkor, however, was vaster and far more sophisticated than anything seen before in that part of the world. Indravarman's original baray, now dry, was 4,400 meters by 1000 meters. It is still called the Khmer baray of Lolei. Indravarman resided at Roluos, a few miles to the south-east of Angkor proper, the Khmer culture capital in which Jayavarman II had died.

At Roluos are the first great works of Khmer temple architecture. They are the Preah Ko, a temple begun in 879, south of Lolei; the king's own temple-mountain, the Bakong, begun in 881; and the ruined Prasat Prei Monti, which was the Khmer king's

palace. All were surrounded by rectangular moats filled by the waters of the Lolei baray. From here the water flowed through the canals and irrigation channels and finally down to the great lake of Cambodia. The huge platforms of earth on which these Khmer buildings were erected probably consist of soil excavated in forming the moats and the channels which not only divided up the city, but also provided an easy means of transport.

Like virtually all Khmer temple buildings, and like Angkor itself, Preah Ko is oriented east to west, with its main gates to the east. Its plan shows it to have been already a most sophisticated architecture of planned space. The moats, the terraced enclosures and the group of six shrines - in two rows of three -are subtly articulated inside their square plan. Their layout is symmetrical only along the east-west axis; the main Khmer temple enclosure, itself square, is set back towards the west in such a way that the front walls of the first row of Khmer temples it contains lie on the central north-south axis.

Khmer temple gates, and pavilions whose close-set pillars seem composed entirely of turned bobbins of stone, are disposed in the area. The Khmer tower shrines, the main three containing stone images of deified male ancestors of the Khmer king, the second three females, were still constructed of brick, faced with stucco ornament, much of which has been lost. The shrines have evolved in such a way as to allow the lowest tier of the structure to reach a considerable height. The Khmer temple roof towers are composed of four

compressed tiers. The door in the face of the lowest tier is the main feature, flanked by high brick pilasters with deep molded capitals. Today Khmer kids are playing in the ruins.

A pair of octagonal stone pillars, with varied horizontal moldings, support magnificent, deep, stone lintels carved with ornamental relief. In the walls are set Khmer stone images of deities carved in deep relief, set in niches crowned with flamboyant-framed arches. Clearly the Khmer stucco relief was magnificent. There must once have been an efflorescence of foliage, in which little figures of deities and animals are involved, all over these walls.

The Bakong was a more deliberately impressive Khmer culture work. It was intended to be Indravarman's own holy lingam shrine on top of its sacred mountain. The Khmer shrine was, like those of Preah Ko, of brick and stucco, and was replaced in the twelfth century. It stands on a series of sandstone terraces with four axial stairways and a gate-tower forty-seven feet high at the foot of each. It forms the centre of what must have been a most impressive group of eight Khmer brick shrines, set in an enclosure with gates, pavilions, and causeways over the moats lined with colossal Nagas, and free-standing Garudas.

There can be little doubt that the huge Khmer terraced pyramid was inspired by - if not so highly elaborated as - the great ninth-century Buddhist monument in Java,

Borobudur. It is also supposed that Jayavarman II commissioned a lesser prototype, Ak Yum. Associated with these two great Khmer monuments are a large number of magnificent sculptures.

There are, of course, the Khmer figures of deities in high relief, attached to buildings, among them figures of the heavenly girls or Apsara whose presence helps to demonstrate the divinity of the shrine. Their postures are far less emphatically female, far more stiff and motionless than such Khmer images were earlier, when they were closer to their Indian prototypes, or than they became later. They do, however, adumbrate one interesting technical invention which became still more important in later Khmer styles, an invention which was not yet incorporated into the freestanding figures: the ring of the top edge of the waist-cloth, where it encircles the hips, is canted forwards, so as to present itself almost in plan view. This greatly enhances the three-dimensional suggestiveness of the relief.

The most important Khmer inventions of Indravarman's artists are the free-standing sandstone sculptures, especially the grouped Khmer figures. The Nagas and Garudas of the Bakong causeways have been mentioned. They are, it is true, clumsy compared with later similar inventions. The Nagas stretch like thick, serpentine rails flanking the approach roads, and the massive Garudas punctuate them at intervals. But this very idea, that sculptures of mythical beings should actually come down from the building and articulate into the everyday world the magical space of which the Khmer temple shrine is formed - represents a major artistic achievement.