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If one is to
believe the legend, the ancient dynasties of the Khmer
empire
were derived from the
union of a Hindu prince, Preah Thong
- who had been
banished from Delhi by his father - with a
“female serpent-woman”, the daughter of the Nagaraja,
who was sovereign of the land.
She
appeared to him in radiant beauty,
frolicking on a sand
bank where he had come to make camp for the night.
He took her as his wife, and the Nagaraja, draining the
land by drinking the water that covered it, gave him
the new country, called it Kambuja and built him a
capital.
A variation,
revealed on an inscription at Mison in Champa (mid Vietnam) and
reproduced in various descriptions of Cambodia, substitutes for
the prince the Brahman Kaundinya, who “married the nagi Soma to
accomplish the rites” and, throwing the magic lance with which
he was armed, founded at the point of itslanding the royal city
where Somavamsa, the race of the moon, would rule.
Another
popular tradition, though less widespread, gives as the origin
the coupling of the maharashi Kambu and the apsara Mera, whose
union is symbolic of that between the two great races, solar
(Suryavamsa) and lunar (Somavamsa). This survives particularly
in the word Kambuja - son of Kambu - from where derives the name
“Cambodian” by which we now call the present descendants of the
ancient Khmer.
Whichever
version one takes, the mythical implication is
undeniable and the truth remains - that the Khmer
people are born of a joining of two distinct elements;
Indian and native.
They are not, as some would believe, just
people of purely Indian or Hindu origin who had come,
following migration, to settle in a region devoid of any
inhabitants, or where the indigenous race had been
eliminated by mass deportation.
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Established
since prehistoric times in the lower Mekong valley of
the southern Indo-Chinese peninsula
that included not
only present day Cambodia but also Cochinchina and parts
of Siam and Laos, they were in fact a mixture - from an
ethnological rather than a
linguistic point of view - of people from lower Burma
and various barbarous people from the annamitic
chain, themselves in turn quite probably deriving from
Negroid and Indonesian roots.
The Indian
contribution apparently resulted from a natural expansion
towards the east for commercial, civil and religious reasons
rather than for any brutal political motivation.
Moreover, with
the fall of the Khmer empire - that so captures the imagination
in the extent and apparently abrupt timing of its destruction -
came perhaps a total decline and abandonment of the capital,but,
mysteriously, not the entire extinction of the race. With a
little help from France and a clear understanding of the glory
of their past, these people soon regained an awareness of their
value and began to rise again, having never ceased to exist.
Having retained their fundamental characteristics - their
traditions, their religion and their language - their artistic
talents need only the opportunity to revive.
Some physical catastrophe, earthquake, flood, or a drying up of
the country’s economy has been suggested, and though it is
difficult to accept that an earthquake could leave so many stone
structures standing, there are however indications, such as the
filling of the enormous basins and low areas of Angkor Thom and
its suburbs, that render the suggestion of an overflow of
the Great Lake or the rupture of some dike plausible - and it is
common that such disasters usually result in epidemic and
devastation. Likewise, the collapse of a perfected hydraulic
system that gave life and fertility to the region could have
quickly transformed to inhospitable areas of land that had until
then been populated and plentiful.
But human causes suffice.
Although only five centuries separate
us rom the date of Angkor’s abandonment as capital, it should
not be forgotten that a hard and far less glorious time followed
the four century period - from the 9th to the 13th - of her
splendour.
Already exhausted by
builder kings seeking to ensure their posthumous glory, the
Khmer people could no longer
offer resistance to a series of bloody wars followed no doubt by
the systematic transfer of the population to slavery. Ruin came,
but not total extinction.
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The national religion is Buddhism of the Small Vehicle, or
Theravada, of the Pali language - which is also practised in
Ceylon, Burma, Thailand and Laos. The monastic life here plays
the principal role and the popular faith, while rudimentary and
sometimes tinted with remains of ancient superstition, is based
on the transmigration of the soul and the search for personal
salvation through work during the course of an existence in
which each action is accounted for in the regulation of the
future. After death the body is carried to the pyre, and the
cremation ends with either the deposit of the ashes in a small
funerary monument (Cedei) or their scattering on sacred ground.
by Maurice Glaize |
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