Empire: World History - 185. The God Kings of Angkor Wat

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

In the 9th century AD, two years after the Holy Roman Empire was established in Western Christendom, another world-shaking empire was rising in the east, more powerful even than that of Charlemagne and far wealthier. Born in what is today Northern Cambodia but long before the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, the mighty Khmer empire dominated most of mainland Southeast Asia, stretching as far north as southern China, and far outsizing the Byzantine empire and its peak. In 802 a mighty warrior king, Jayavarman II, united the warring clans, made dynastic alliances and conquered his way to supremacy. His descendants would become God Kings…Meanwhile, in the famed city of Angkor, the divine kings of the Khmers built a temple of such epic proportions and complexity, such beauty, that its fame - like the temple itself - would endure across the ages: Angkor Wat. But what is the truth of Angkor Wat’s origins? And how much does it owe to the example of India? Join William and Anita as they discuss the extraordinary Khmer empire and the divine kings who raised her, illuminating as they do, one of the greatest lost history’s in all the world. To fill out the survey: survey.empirepoduk.com To buy William's book: https://coles-books.co.uk/the-golden-road-by-william-dalrymple-signed-edition Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. The northwest of Cambodia, beyond the waters of the Great Lake, a line of blue mountains rise abruptly from the rich plains of right paddy that stretch up, from the banks of the Mekong. At first, these hills climb sharply from the flat plain. Then, quite suddenly, they crest into a long, straight sandstone plateau,

which seems to float mysteriously above the low clouds of winter cumulus. These are the heights of Pnom Kulin, the mountains of Liches. For Cambodians, these haunting hills are a sacred space. the birthplace not just of the great empire of Angkor, but also of the holy rivers which water its plains and lap around its most holy temples. Here, just two years after Charlemagne had declared the birth of the Holy Roman Empire in Italy, another young warrior, the Khmer Prince Jaivarman II, performed a similar ceremony on Pnom Kulin, initiating yet another world-changing empire.

But this one was arguably of even greater consequence than that founded in St. Peter's. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremberg. You did a very lovely reading, by the way. That's the Golden Road again. And you write so beautifully. You really do write beautifully well. We're actually recording this on publication day.

It's very exciting day today. I know we've got a publication party this evening. We do. Yes. Are you going to get very dressed up, by the way, just very quickly? I don't do dressing up. Well, you do. Yes, you do, you do.

I have seen you do dressing up. Are you going blue shirt? You're going full mogul splendor. What are you doing? I think just blue shirt, don't you? What do you think? Maybe I should. Maybe I should go full mogul staturedard up.

It's your book launch, you fool. I always tell you. I tell you what we've got, which is what I'm most looking forward to, is we've got Sanjub Basker doing a bespoke version of the goodness gracious me, uncle. Oh, he's so fabulous. Anyway, right, down to business, my friend. No more talking about what I'm wearing tonight, which now I'm going to rethink if you're wearing a blue shirt.

Anyway, we're talking about the origins of the Khmer Empire, otherwise known as the Empire of Angkor. And for most people, William, Khmer will mean one thing. It'll sort of resonate with the Khmer Rouge because of movies, and we've talked about these things, the killing fields and so on. The Khmer Rouge was the popularly given name for the CPK, the Communist Party of Campocia. But this is a very modern history with,

roots in a very ancient civilization. It's the ancient that we're talking about today. You're right. That's what people in Britain, people in the West do associate with the word Khmer. But it's odd because the Khmer Rouge is slightly like sort of saying the red tudors or something. Or the Tudor gang or something like that. You know, something very... It's attaching to the word red communist, the thing that's in a sense least communist in the whole of history. A very hierarchical and very royal kingdom ruled by God. God kings, the Devrages, who sort of believe that they actually incarnated the God in their ruling and were regarded as deities as well as monarchs, a very far cry from the equality of the Khmer Rouge

with their village republics. Indeed. And also, I mean, we cannot overestimate the wealth of this great Khmer kingdom. I mean, how filthy, stinking rich are we thinking here? Well, quite simply, they were the richest, the most powerful state on earth at the time. The Khmer Empire lasted for about 400, 500 years. It had what were then the biggest cities in the world, creating the largest temples ever built, and Ancour Wat on its own, the most celebrated and largest, but by no means unique. There are many other sort of second, third and fourth ranked temples that are almost as big, but Ankur Wat on its own is four times the entire size of the Vatican City. It's the largest, religious monument on earth. And what's so odd is that it hardly figures, as you say, in Western

curriculums. Here we have one of the most sophisticated and largest and richest empires and history, arguably the richest and most powerful of all medieval empires, you know, more powerful the Byzantium building larger remains, which are still there by and large. And because it's in this country which has been closed off for a lot of the last half century with one of the kind of most ghastly regimes ever produced by communism. No, arguably the worst, I think, along with Mao's China, and people just don't know it and don't know the extraordinary history. And I have to say, when I was researching the Golden Road

in the five years I spent immediately after lockdown, traveling around and looking at these extraordinary worlds that I was writing about, nothing compared to. with the time I spent in Cambodia. You go into the jungles of Cambodia, which is one of the most sort of heartbreakingly beautiful countries I've ever been in. And, you know, it isn't just Angkor Wat. There are these enormous temples all over the city.

And while Angkor is quite tidied up, you know, the grass is cut and all the vegetation was restrained 150 years ago because it was immediately recognized as one of the great wonders of the world. There are only sighted. smaller temples all over Cambodia, which are still, you know, collapsing with vines creeping in and out of them, with amazing strangler vines, and these enormous fig trees, which are such a feature of Cambodian jungles, spiraling through the extraordinary stonework and sort of emerging out of ruse. There is a reason that when Angelina Jolie was doing Tomb Raider, that they sort of filmed half of it

in Angkor Wat in the vicinity, it totally encapsulates that image of a lost civil. civilization in the jungle, which is, you know, it's such a romantic idea in general, but given the beauty of the Khmer countryside and the brilliance of Khmer sculpture, the combination is a complete knockout. It's still a very unvisited country, and I would recommend it to anyone for their next big ambitious trip. Also, I think the medieval period is just so interesting. I mean, if you're interested in that period of history and you want to learn more, you can be part of our Empire Club, because we're discussing all of these things. One of the things we've talked about is the Mappamundi and the world's, the idea of what the world was actually like here in

the West. And all you need to do is go to EmpirePod UK.com to go and have a listen to us prattling about some of these amazing things. But this is an era where gods and powers are linked together, William. I mean, you mentioned Charlemagne a couple of times. And Charlemagne, for those who don't know, is the man who begins, if you like, gives birth to the Holy Roman Empire in Europe. So power on earth and power in heavens are inextricably linked in two sides of the world here, aren't they? But I think you get a far clearer view in the Hindu system of kingship, specifically in its incarnation in Cambodia, that the king is the god.

Is the god himself, yes, because Charlemagne is God's priest on earth, but this is an actual direct link. And what you find in Cambodia is that from the beginning with Jaivama and the second, the person we're talking about, the guy that finds this empire, his sculptures of himself, his royal portrait sculptures, are tagged onto the body of Vishnu. So there he is with his discus and his cont shell. And so we know what he looks like, but he's depicted as Vishnu,

which you don't get an India. You don't get, you know, the Chola King showing themselves to be Lord Shiva or whatever it is. I mean, it could be seen as slightly blasphemous these days, couldn't it, to have a human's head on the god's body. And for those who don't know that statue of Vishnu, the discus or the chakra that you're talking about, is Vishnu's role in the universe, that he has the entire universe spinning on the top of his finger, all of creation.

He keeps it going. He keeps it turning. He keeps it spinning. But it also has a, it represents his sacred weapon. And the discus is a throwing weapon. And so, for example, when he's fighting demons, he appears in many sculptures, throwing his, and this is a real weapon that was used as late as the 19th century by the Sikhs. Well, the Sikhs used it. Yes, I've seen them. Yes, I know they've used it in warfare. Yeah. You have these razor-sharp throwing discs. which you want to keep well away from, if you're... I don't think you've ever been subjected to this, but in the 1980s, there were a whole slew

of Indian films about gods. I mean, I pretty much learnt a lot of my religion from movies, like copies of movies, and they would have these terrible special effects where suddenly the discus would take off from the finger of God, and just, you know, and it would be the worst, it'd be like they put sparklers around a plate or something, and it would just very slowly make its way across to a man dressed as a demon whose head would fall off, obviously turned into a mannequin and plop on. Anyway, look, Prince Jaya Varmann, what's his origin story? Tell us about it. So, Jai Varmann is a very, very important character because it seems, I mean, first thing to be said is that everything we know about this crucial period of history comes from a small handful of inscriptions, many of which are quite a lot later, including the most famous of all, which is in a temple just over what's now the Thai border.

and a huge amount of early command history, particularly the whole period of Jaya Vem II, has been reconstructed on the basis of a single inscription made 400 years later with its own axe to grind. And so it may not be in any sense an accurate representation of what happened 400 years earlier. But what traditionally is believed to have happened is that Jaya Vaman II was originally a hostage over the sea

on the island of Java, which was at that point a very advanced Buddhist kingdom ruled by the sea lords of Sri Vajia, which sounds like something out of Game of Thrones, but it actually kind of was. It was a confederation of island sea kings who controlled fleets that became very rich by controlling the Malacca Straits. If you look at the geography of Southeast Asia, if you're trying to get from India to China, much the quickest way is through the Malacca states. and it's very narrow, and so it's been prone both to piracy, but also to control by powerful

sea lords throughout its history who tax people. And Sriva Jaya seems to have gained a lot of its wealth by basically enforcing a toll on all shipping moving between India and China. And this was the kingdom which built Borobador, which we were discussing in our last episode, the great Buddhist kingdom. And the theory is that Jaya Vama II, as a hostage, in Java may have seen Borobador being built. And when he escaped, or certainly made his way back to Cambodia by hook or by crook, in 1802, he declares his independence from the control of these sea lords, who are over the sea and a different religion. They are Buddhist. Right. And is he a hostage? Because they basically take people from ships and say,

OK, if you want to see your loved one back, pay us some money. I mean, is that why he's been taken? Do we know how old he was when he's taken? He's a hostage because he's from one of the noble families of Cambodia, which is under the rule of these Buddhist sea kings, the Sylendra's, at this period. And at least according to this later inscription, what happens is that somehow he escapes from Java, where he's a hostage, for the good behavior of his family. And he makes his way back to Cambodia, where he breaks free from the sea kings of Sriva Jaya and declares himself independent. and he has a magical ceremony on Pnom Kulin, those hills which I was describing in the reading at the beginning, which not only declares the beginning of a new Hindu kingdom in Cambodia, he also performs magic rituals with a Shevite priest, a priest of Lord Shiva,

which will ensure, according to the inscription, that Holy Cambodia is never again ruled by Java. So, I mean, just a couple of observations. Indian listeners, this is going to be mind-blowing, because these are names that are familiar in India. You know, Shriva Jaya, Jairama, you know, they are names that exist in India today. This is an ethnically Cambodian man who has names that feel, sound, Indian. So, you know, that whole thing of the spread of Indian influence, you really feel it and see it. So this is the whole extraordinary story of Indian influence in Southeast Asia, and it's very important to somehow get the balance right. There's a famous quote from

Tagore, who visits this area in the early 20th century. And he says, when he goes to Angkor, everywhere I could see India, but I could not recognize it. And what he meant by that is that everything is grown from Indian seeds, that these are Indian ideas developed in India, the iconography of the gods, the idea of a Hindu kingdom. Freezes from the Mahabharat, you know, all of those things are stupid. sculptures, the Ramayana. But they don't look the same. But they look different.

But they look different. And these sculptures are all very clearly ethnically Khmer. They wear the very short Khmer, Lungi, which is called the Sampot. It's different. It's a different civilization, but it's grown out of the same seed. So it's a kind of very muddling thing if you're an Indian, used to the different sorts of Hinduism in India, because this is, again, a completely different version. Yes. Same meat, different gravy, my brother would say. It's an Essex term, I think.

That is a very homely way of putting it. It is true. Look, but we've talked about how Buddhists exported their religion and, you know, be through the straits of commerce, mostly on ships and over mountains, but, you know, the religion was carried on carts of gold, if you like. But what about this religious spread of Hinduism? I mean, we're pundits doing the same thing? Why is it that he knows the tantric rituals? So, you know, Most people even in India wouldn't know. Only a select number of priests would know those tantric rituals. So how did he know this?

Correct. And here we have a paradox because in the laws of Manu, which are the basic laws of a Hindu king, which are now available in the Penguin Classic, which lay down the classical form of Hindu law in a Hindu kingdom. In that system, Brahmins are not allowed to travel. Right. So that's why my mind's not working.

Well, they're not allowed to move anywhere. Someone broke a rule, didn't they, William? Someone must have broken a rule. So there is all sorts of ways which clearly the Brahman's got around this, because we see these sculptures. There's a wonderful sculpture at a place called Campong Tom, where you have a single local ruler, you know, it's rather sort of gruff-looking chiefted

with a sort of walrus moustache, who's clearly a big, beefy sort of local strong man. And he's in a little pavilion. And on either side of him, stretching along this lintel, are about sort of either side, 16 Brahmins, all in their lungis, all with their hair piled up. And one of them is pouring some liquid from a pot onto his head. And this is the Abysheka ceremony. This is the consecration.

But clearly, it was made worthwhile for the Brahmins to make this potentially cast-destroying trip. Decision, yeah. Because you don't break these rules lightly. Well, you do have an awareness that this is not necessarily what they were allowed to do. So some claimed to have arrived by yoga. In other words, they didn't cross the Black Sea. They meditated their way over. They're notty Brahmins.

And you actually see that in quite a few descriptions. But what is even more exciting is the idea that they got ran this rule by turning Cambodia into an extension of the Indian Holy Land. So they didn't leave. They didn't leave at all. They just converted this place to India. Right. And you see an expression of that. at the place where the reading at the beginning of the episode starts, because Plomkulin is,

as I said, the source of the spring which turns into the river, which waters seam reap and anchor. And just about 500 yards from where the water bubbles out of the earth and where there is a little shrine, in the 9th century, around the time of Jaivarman II, someone has at some point dammed the stream. and on the bed of the rock of the river, they have carved from bank to bank, Sheva Lingams and Yonis, the male and female principle, which seems to be a sort of form of baptising the river. I mean, to turn it into a holy river, to turn it into a version of the Ganges. Yeah, I was struck when you were talking about the, I love it, the translation of Mountain of Ligis, Phnom Kulin, which I'm just now imagining is just covered and peppered with these wonderful fruit. It kind of is. He renames the highest peak Mount Mahindra.

Now Mount Mahindra to Hindus is entirely spiritual. It's mentioned in the Ramayon. It's mentioned in the Puguit Gita. It is the mountaintop of the gods. The Mount Olympus of Hinduism, yeah. That's the best way of putting it. So the Brahmins make that into Mount Mahendra, so they haven't left. They haven't left India because this is a new Indian holy land.

It's an administrative loophole. It's good. Yeah. And you find all these cities being rebuilt again. So the earliest city of Bangkok, which is now an hour outside modern Bangkok, is Ayutia, which is another version of Ayodhya. Birthplace of Lord Rama, for those who don't know, again, another very important place in Hinduism. And if you go just over the border to Laos, there is a Kurokshatra.

Just crazy. Which is one of the very first Indian names, the site of the Great Battle of the Mahabharata. Yeah. So you have this whole area, in other words, reimagined anew as a Hindu. Holy Land. And one of the things that is powering this is the arrival, first of all, of Sanskrit as a holy language, which becomes the court language, the language of the inscriptions. And it's very interesting that the inscriptions are never written in sort of the kind of cod Latin that you sometimes get in Western ecclesiastical texts, which would make Cicero or any of the

great Roman writers sort of roll their eyes with horror. Yeah. The Sanskrit in Cambodia is perfect. It is absolutely grammatically without any errors. And you actually get the impression that the Khmerz are far more bookish than the Hindus in India. There's endless references to obscure texts by Kaledasa. There's a whole temple. There's a wonderful temple built by one of the chief ministers outside Siam Reap, which is almost a kind of show-off place where he's just put every sculpture of every great Hindu text that he's ever read to show off his learning. Right. So, Sheriff Arman, who now has got this direct link with Hindu gods,

has been anointed by the gods in a country which he is turning, name by name, mountain by river, by stream, into an extension, almost of old India. He is a military tactician as well. He starts military campaigns with great success. Correct. And starts amassing lands. Tell us more about that. So, Jaya Vaman II, like Shalemain, is a war leader.

And like Shalemaine, he doesn't just conquer by winning victories, but by gathering an alliance of chieftains and by sort of very extensive intermarriage with his potential rivals. So he gathers a great number of wives who are from all the leading clans. And by the time he is heading into old age, it's not only the whole of modern Cambodia, which has become the beginning of this new kingdom of Angkor. But Laos, the border regions of Vietnam, and quite a lot of northern Thailand is absorbed into it.

And in the inscriptions, they talk about his kingdom stretching from the mountain of Liches to the hills of mango or something. There's a lovely version of these. Oh, yeah, no. It's in your book, The Land of Cardamoms and Mangoes, which is probably, you say Thailand. Okay, so he is kind of. Conquering? And is he conquering and converting? I mean, are people then becoming Hindu under his reign? They suddenly change their religions.

So this is what we don't know, because they say all we have is the inscriptions. And as in any ruling elite, the inscriptions tend to be about the aristocrats and the kings. And we don't know so much about the common people. The impression we're getting is that there is already a base layer in Cambodia before all this, which is not totally. dissimilar to the sort of animism that also existed in southern India before the arrival of Hinduism and Buddhism there. So there is a worship of the spirits of the rivers, the spirits of the trees, particularly the big sort of strangler figs and the enormous trees of the forest. And this is the basis in India for the Yakshis and the Nagas who figure in Hindu myth too, a pre-Hindu, pre-Buddhist, lair of animist religion, which exists in both places. there's a similar foundation and Hinduism fits very neatly on top of that. But what you get

very clearly the impression is that Hinduism is something that appeals to the rulers and the Brahmins are aiming for the patronage of the rulers and focusing on them. How much the common farmers working in the paddy fields were also part of this is not clear. How far they went on worshipping, for example, their ancestors. Yeah. Which was again another important thing in Southeast Asia, which is not an Indian thing. You also get the clear impression that a lot of the laws of man who are completely ignored by the people of Southeast Asia. Like, for example, the fact they love their pork, which is something that completely horrify a good Brahmin. But these guys are sitting there all over Ankhaw watch who have pictures of, you know, piggies being sort of boiled and cut up and

served in enormous feasts. And there are references to beer being served by the priests. And there are also references to female Brahmins. That's crazy. Operating in temples. So you have women Brahmins operating in the Khmer temples, which you'd never ever get in India. Okay, so this is, again, it's sort of similar but different, you know, same meat, different gravy. And the other thing that is striking, if you do have a Hinduization of the lands of this Hindu king, is that you're actually not meant to be able to convert to Hinduism. You're born into Hinduism. It's part of, you know, the karmic cycle.

You're born as what you're going to be. No one seems to have told that to the promise. No, I know. But I think this is all fascinating. Now, look, there is also a mythologizing of the origin of this Hindu empire that involves a dragon king and javelin's throne. Can you tell us about that? Because I love it. This is interesting because it has echoes to a myth which is also present in India. And in the South Indian version of this story, it's the foundation myth of the Palava kings of Kachiburam that we talked about in the last episode.

We talked, remember, about Mahendra Vaman Palava who builds all those wonderful sculptures at Mamalapuram. So in this story, we get the arrival off the coast of Cambodia of a South Indian Brahmin named Kandinia. And he said to have arrived and thrown a javelin in the direction of a local nymph called Mera, the daughter of the local Naga king, in other words, the local serpent king, who'd paddled out to meet him when his boat first appeared on the horizon, which wasn't a very sort of polite thing to do. he then shot his arrow into her boat and frightened Mera into marrying him. He gave her clothes to wear because she was naked, and Lord Shiva himself presided over the ceremony. And then you get another fascinating bit of the myth that Mera's father, Soma, who was a dragon king, enlarged the possessions of his son and all by drinking up the water that covered the country, which seems to be a reference to the beginning of hydraulics, that you begin.

to get the control of the waters of the Mekon, which is the basis of the entire prosperity of the Khmer Kingdom, because unlike the Sri Vajaya Buddhist kings who were taxing trade and existed off the profits of trade, the Khmer Kingdom was always based on the prosperity of its hydraulic agriculture and the increase of enormous rice harvests, which got larger and larger as they got better and better at controlling the water and learning how to grow rice in paddy fields. So you seem to have in this myth several things happening. You have the story of Indians arriving and marrying into the royal family. You have the idea of possibly the Indians bringing hydraulic technology, which allows the locals to begin controlling the waters of the Mekong and the monsoon waters and learning how to do

advanced wet rice agriculture to get more than one harvest year. indeed at the height of the Khmerer Empire, there's meant to have been four rice crops a year, which was the source of enormous amount of food, allowing kingdoms like Angkor to grow capital cities more than a million people strong and to field enormous armies. So you get rather like in early Mesopotamia with the first city-states like Ur and Uruk, where the beginnings of agriculture lead to a highly organized urban life where people's lives are suddenly run by a king or a god king. This is happening in 12th century Angkor on a much, much greater scale. And I remember when I was visiting Pernom Kulin, the place where it all started,

you see the first of many of these cities up on the mountain of Pernam Kulun, and it's still in the jungle. It's rather like being a Victorian explorer when you go there because there is no road leading to the pyramid where Jiveyman II declared his new kingdom. You have to go on the back of a motorbike. I sat pillion behind this guy in the bazaar who offered to drive me there. And you bump through irrigation runnels and through walnut and mango orchards. And suddenly there in the middle of the jungle, this enormous big step pyramid. until recently surrounded by landmines,

because this was a place where the Khmer Rouge hung out longest when they got kicked out of the rest of the kingdom. So it used to be quite a dangerous place to visit. And to this day, there's no facilities for tourists, there's no roads to the sites. You can go there and see the very first of the kingdoms of Angkor. And just when I was there, there was a whole series of people from, I think,

the University of Chicago, who'd been using LIDAR, which is this new archaeological technology, which can see through the jungle and plot foundations hidden by the canopy. And using this new technology, they'd mapped this entire city, which was completely invisible beneath the jungle, the first great city of Ankle. Okay.

Well, look, let's take a break here. And when we come back from the break, I'd really like to know about, okay, it's one thing to say you are a god king, but what does that look like in your court and what does that look like in your rules and what does that look like in your governance of the increasing number of people who come under your canopy? Welcome back. So just before the break, we were giving you, or rather than William was giving you from his marvelous book, The Golden Road, has this in much more detail if you want to have a look at that.

It is a really super, super read. And today we're recording this on publication day. So it's kind of auspicious, really, to be talking about this. But we were talking about sort of the recreation, the extension of India, and that's how sort of the Brahmins might have justified being in a different country, because Brahmers weren't allowed to travel, and how, you know, you have the evidence of this fast-growing, wealthy beyond your wildest dreams empire of Javarman II,

growing and increasing and creating things like Uncle Watt. And I just wanted to know, you know, the Brahmins who must see this all sort of piling up around them, both wealth and also buildings and structures, did they have control? Were they politicians? as well? Were they in the court? Were they whispering in the king's ear? I mean, how much were Brahmins running things at this time? I think that they were running everything. And the Brahmins arrive in large numbers from the 6th and 7th century in Java from probably more like the 8th century in Cambodia. And why are they welcomed at these courts? Because they bring with them

a package of incredibly useful boxes of tricks. They are firstly literate. There is no written language in Cambodia before the Brahmins bring it to them. And these guys bring the South Indian script, and they bring with them the methods of administration, they are numerate, they know bookkeeping, and they basically transfer their system of braminical administration, which is already established now in all the kingdoms of India by this stage. They just transfer it over the Bay of Bengal and set themselves up running the courts of the local chieftains. So these guys who've been building themselves up by dint of their power in war and local strong men, suddenly become the beloved of the gods, the beloved of Shiva. And what's interesting is you get different waves of these sort of Hindu missionaries

coming. Initially, the first wave seemed to be Vashnav. In other words, they follow Lord Vishnu, and they set up temples to the different incarnations of Lord Vishnu, like Lord Rama and Lord Krishna. What you find by the 10th century is the arrival of some completely different bunch of holy men called the Pashupatas who follow Lord Shiva. And the Pashupattas have been around in Central Asia and North India and Central India from very early times. They're mentioned in the Mahabarat and in various of the Puranas. And even Shwan Zhang, our friend, the Buddhist wandering Buddhist monk, comes across them when he's traveling through Afghanistan. up. And these guys do not sleep in beds. They sleep in ashes in cremation grounds. And they bathe themselves not in water, but in the ashes of the cremation fires. So they are ghostly white,

covered in ash and very spooky looking. They are scholars. They are poets. They dance to Lord Shiva's drums, but they're also administrators and strong men. And these guys turn up in the sculptures of Cambodia from the 10th century, scary-looking guys with tridents, and they seem to sort of take over. It's like, for example, in 11th century France, the Cistercian order and the Cluniac order of monks are two rival orders of monks

who at different times advise different French and Spanish kings. The same sort of thing is going on here with the Paschupatas coming, a different order of holy men who are competing with the previous, Vashnav Brahmins who'd been there before them. So you get this whole world now of a dominance of these magical, shavite, ash-covered monks who claim to be able to perform all sorts of wonders that their rivals don't. Okay. And this would be appealing to a god king, who actually from what

you're saying, probably does believe he is a god king, because if you're surrounding yourself with magic and people who say they can create miracles from their ash-covered fingertips, and that is all that you're surrounded with, you will start to believe that you are the divine. And this is there from the beginning. Remember when we were talking about the Holy Man who makes Jaya Vaman free from the control of Java. His name is Hiranya Danma. And he has magic spells, Ciddy's which no one else has obtained, says the inscription. And he is a scientist in magic science. Right. So you get the impression that these guys are claiming all sorts of wonderworking capacities,

the like our Merlin. Yes. The Buddhist version of this in the last episode. I like that episode. Yes. One of the things that these Bushabaths would have brought with them and maybe sort of transformed again the change to make it Cambodian. Tell me about death dancing, you know, the death drums, the spirit drumming.

Exactly. That's such a visual thing in my head of almost whirling dervish type ecstasy that is brought on by this. So this is really interesting. You asked quite rightly. a few minutes ago, what are the ordinary people in the fields doing? Are they converting to Hinduism? The signs are that early on, they weren't really sort of brought into this, that they were carrying on doing their ancestor worship in the fields while all this rabbinical stuff was going on

in the court in the city, and the Brahmins were focusing on the rulers, but not particularly on the ordinary people. What the Pashtupatta's change is that they have this tradition of spirit drumming and death dancing. Lord Shiva has a drum called a Damaru. Damaru, yeah, that's how we would say. Damaru. Sorry, Damaru, I'm mispronouncing it. No, no, no, that's right. When you see that image of the dancing Shiva, the famous sort of circular image of

Nataraja, yeah, in the round circle. Exactly. One of the things that Lord Shiva is holding is a drum, and he's dancing the world into first destruction, then recreating it. Yeah. Can I explain that a little bit? Because, I mean, I've grown up with that tradition. I've grown up in this tradition, so I know it, as you would know Christianity.

Sure, please do. The whole thing is that Shiva is the destroyer, but he's not evil. He's meant to be of the triumvir, the most innocent. Borlinath is one of his name, which is like the innocent one. You have to have destruction to have renewal, is the whole philosophy behind it. Can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, is the idea. Right, but also things need to be renewed and refreshed, and also evil needs to be destroyed. So a lot of the stories involving Shiva are when he opens his third eye.

He has a third eye in the middle of his head, and if you look at these statues, is when it opens, and God forbid you're anywhere near it when it opens, anything that he sees is reduced to ashes. The drum is not just the drum of death. It's sort of also the heartbeat of the universe, but when he dances and when he thunders with his feet and his drum, then everything collapses. So that's how, you know, everything is raised to the ground so that it may grow again. And that is, if you are familiar with Shiva iconography, there is something called the Nataraja, which is the dancing aspect of him, which is encircled. And it's a beautiful thing. many people over their house. I should just say for those who can't see Anita at this moment,

she just... Oh, I'm doing it with my hands. Immediately put up her hands in the form that Lord Shiva takes, which indicates you probably to dance as a. Do you do dance as a girl? We all had to a little bit when we were little. I was terrible at it. I was very impressed by that. That was exactly the right pose. Thank you so much. So many things you don't know about me. But anyway, yes, so they have taken the dance of destruction to get to their ecstasy. That's interesting. And so what's significant, is that this provided a link to the ordinary people of Cambodia, because one of the things that is there in the archaeological record in the earliest phase in Cambodia and in Thailand

and in Laos are ancient bronze kettle drums, which date back centuries before this, and implies that there was a similar sort of tradition of spirit dancing of some sort, which existed in Cambodia. And the historians theorize, which seems to be completely reasonable, but that the Pasupatas, because of their dancing and their drumming, had a link to the ordinary people of Cambodia that the previous Vashnav Brahmins did not have. Right. And they invite the local people into this. And this is the point when Hinduism begins to spread much more widely through the countryside.

Because it's got the same taste now. It's familiar. I thought this is also very interesting. And there are many inscriptions at this period. I'll just read one. The dance of the god who has the moon for his diadem. That's Lord Shiva. the play of whose glorious feet causes the earth to shake and tremble in the eight directions.

A dance which causes Indra, God of the Winds, to whirl and moan, and which causes the palaces of the gods to sway a dance which renders space insignificant, with shooting rays from the splendor of his nine modes of dance. And that's talking about the different kinds of dance you get, which is erotic, furious, heroic, odious, pathetic, marvellous, terrible and peaceful. If only strictly had those on their panels. I think there's definitely a new...

What do you think? Marks from the jury, odious. See what Claudia Wincombe makes of that. Oh, it would be so funny. Okay, so I mean, you talked about some of the Indian customs that were not adopted. I mean, like, you know, this love of pork and pork chops. And beer. Yes. But we skittered over the one that is really different in Cambodia.

And I want to go into it because I'm a girl. But women, I mean, women were leading prayer. Women were in charge of temples. I mean, what was their role? Because you have Dave Darces in India who were servants of the temple. Not only servants to the temple, but in the kind of more sort of tragic versions of it, at temple prostitutes kind of at the service of the temple Brahmins and their visitors. Right.

This is completely different. In Cambodia, you get references to, several of the kings insisting on the daughters of Brahmins, inheriting the temples. So you have something impossible to imagine in India, which is women Brahmins running the temples. That's amazing. I love that. That's great. I love that so much. Was there a caste system as there was in India? This seems again to be another aspect of Hinduism, which failed to make it across the Bré of Bengal. Wow. So you have a castless, women-led Hinduism. which eats pork and drinks beer.

It just attracts them, doesn't it? Yeah, well, I mean, sort of easy to sign up to, for women at least. Okay. And science, you said, you know, there was magic, but there was also science. I mean, you talked about, and I find this extraordinary, this idea of these ash covered, almost, they don't feel human because if you've seen them, if you've travelled around India, you know, they do feel sort of different and above, and they look fierce and ferocious. but they had scientific know-how as well as literacy. They did. I mean, what you get the impression is that the Khmer's were far more bookish than anyone in India.

And once they got Sanskrit, they taught it with incredible accuracy and enthusiasm. And we have in particular this one temple, which some people say is the most beautiful of all the temples in Cambodia. And Corwater is the most famous because it's just massively the biggest. But outside Siam Reap to the north, there's a tiny temple, a gorgeous little jewel box called Bante Sray. And this was built by a prime minister, not by one of the kings, a guy called Yajna Varaha. And he is famous for his learning. And the temple actually contains two buildings, which are supposed to be libraries, which had slots for all the palm leaf manuscripts. And you get the impression that he spent his life reading the.

manuscripts, because you get on the walls references to the most obscure Sanskrit literature. And God, I mean, the sculptures are spectacular. There's a famous image of Durga, the extraordinary Hindu goddess. Yeah, Mother Goddess. And my favourite historian of Indian arts, Stella Krammrish, talked about the image of Durga with a sinuous pattern of limbs rounded by the sap of youth, which I think is a lovely usage. And you have all these images there which have no precedent in Indian art. And you get the impression that the king has taken them from his reading. So he's like this very bookish guy sitting there and said,

oh, I'll have one of those. So you have, as well as sort of well-known images like Ravenna shaking Mount Kailash to attract the attention of Lord Shiva, that's the demon king of the Ramayana, which is something you also see in Alora. you get many other images from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which are unknown in Indian art, but which exist here. And you have this lovely little inscription as you come into this temple, where Yajna Vara talks about the curriculum he set for his kid brother.

And so we get a reading list, something you'd find nowhere in India, of all the texts that he thinks that the younger brother should read in order to become a gentleman. But I love this. I mean, so learned it. I get learned. But also, just circling back to what I was actually trying to get at is, is scientific know-how. So you have, you know, these Brahmins or whoever it is, and a bookish king. But they're able to do things that others have not been able to do. Apart from, you know, these amazing constructions of these extraordinary temples, you've got large-scale dams, reservoirs, canal systems, you know, an agricultural policy that means that, you know, you'll be able to have crops for long. A fishing policy that will allow, you know, I don't know whether it's on quotas or what, but there's an abundance of fish all year round because there are rules and stipulations and there's the science behind it. There's method in this. And when you look down from Pnom Kulin over the plains of Cambodia, you can see for miles and miles that every inch of this landscape has been controlled by

locks, by water systems, by canals, by irrigation runnels. And there's nothing casual about this landscape at all. It's not like, you know, you wander through the Yorkshire Moors and it looks like, you know, Virgin Territory with just Heather. Every single inch of the plains around Cambodia has been tamed and organized and turned into the most productive soil in Southeast Asia. And I love the fact that it's a Chinese ambassador who is writing back going, bloody hell these camers have got this sorted, you know. He's talking about how they've controlled irrigation, how they could harvest up to four rice crops a year. He talks about doubling more than 50 million flooded plains into harvest using something called floating rice and other techniques. Do you know what floating rice is?

I mean, this is what the Chinese ambassador is talking about. Yes, I think it's a way that you take the shoots of the rice and you organize it in such a way that they're not. actually in soil that they are growing on the water surface. In other words, you can have a sort of second layer of rice growing in the same area. Two-tier rice production. I mean, it's genius. So look, that actually leads me to another question, which is, so clearly the Chinese had sent ambassadors to Jermann. I mean, was this a thriving metropolis of international trade and visitation? Or did he do so much to increase his landmass that he didn't really need to bother with the rest of the world. Well, yes, there was a lot of international trade clearly, and the Mekong was the big motorway,

which you find many Chinese junk sailing up. But it does seem that the prosperity of the kingdom depended not so much on the... On outside. But it was just the brilliant organisation of the harvest and the massive amount of rice which was produced, which allowed the city of Angkor to grow to 1.5 million people at a time when London was about 15,000 people. That's just nuts. That's, I mean, those are good figures there to put things in perspective. And as you say, this is stuff that no one studies at school. No one knows about this empire. You know, you might if you go to a very good history class, it's a little bit about the Byzantine Empire and Constantinople or something. But this is something much bigger and much more sophisticated and

much more scientifically advanced. And it barely figures in anyone's imagination other than as sort of the background to Angelina Jolie swinging, swinging through temple roofs in Tumra. Yeah. Yeah. And so tell me, I mean, we talked at the beginning of this about this empire of the Kmer's lasting, you said, 400 years, 400 years? Yeah, exactly. I mean, do we know what happened to Jeovarman and how he died? And where all of his, you know, those who came after, were they as successful as him. So there is this long succession of kings who, you know, inevitably like in British history, not necessarily direct descendants, so they claim to be collaterals or something, there's all sorts of strange cousins who turn and endless military coups and so on. The last of which is by this

extraordinary ruler, Surio Vaman II. That means Suria is the sun god and that means he who is protected by the sun. And Suriovahman, the second again, is some very distant cousin of the Khmer Royal Line, who comes to power very bloodily in 1113 and is anointed by a descendant of the same Brahmin who had anointed Jai Vama in the second. So you get a dynasty of royal Brahmins, as well as the dynasty of King anointus. That's interesting, yeah. And we have the inscriptions which talk about the gifts during this consecration of two fans of peacock feathers with golden handles, four white parasol, ear ornaments and gold. golden bowls, workers, elephants and sacred brown cattle. But this is the man, Suria Vama

the second, who begins work on the big one, on ankle wad. And he's an interesting character because not only is he a great warlord, he is a diplomat. And he is in direct touch with the famous Chola Kings of South India, the guys who invent the Chola bronzes, who are now themselves great power. They make raids into Southeast Asia, and according to an inscription on the temple in Tangor, the Cholos actually conquer several of the ports in the Malacca Straits, that they defeat Shriver Jaya and kidnap the king back to Tangor with them. And the Khmer's as the land power in Cambodia stretching out through Thailand, Laos and parts of Vietnam, and the Cholas as this naval power operating out of South India,

create an alliance. And they give gifts to each other, that King Suryovarman gives a golden chariot to the Cholah King in Tangor. And the great achievement of Suryavarman is Ankhawat, which he begins work on in 1122. And he unusually is a devotee of Vishnu, rather than Lord Shiva,

which has been the dominant feature of Khmer royal life for the previous two or three hundred years. and the complex doesn't get finished in his lifetime. It's such a vast undertaking that it takes three decades of hard labour to compete. The moat alone takes 5,000 men 10 years of digging, while the temple inside it contains more stone than the largest Egyptian pyramid. Yet no mortar is used. It's all done with a sort of joints and tenens rather than lime mortar. And this in, I mean, I don't know whether you haven't been there any of you. No, no, my brother has.

Oh, it's one of the great wonders of the world, quite simply. So I hear. It's absolutely extraordinary. What's lovely about it is the sort of jungles around it are still completely intact. It's not an urban world that you're coming to it from. You're coming to it from trees and vines. And out of these trees, the Cambodian jungle, this sort of mountain of masonry rising in successive ranges, great tumbling screes of plinths and capitals and octagonal pillars

and lotus jams and everywhere these sculpted figures of lions and dragons and elephants, gods and godlings, but particularly the dancing girls. You have hundreds of thousands of images of Khmer dancing girls, all individually sculpted with individual features and with the humanity of actual portraits. You get the impression that these. of, you know, girls that the sculptors knew. Yeah. And what's extraordinary is that as well as being a temple in the Hindu tradition, it contains within it the ashes of Suri of Armand II are like a sort of Buddhist stupa. You'd never have that in a Hindu temple, that you'd never have a burial within the main temple. But the spires of Angkor are, and this is my favorite word,

a quincunx, which is the shape of a five on a dice. And that gorgeous. And so the central dot, if you like, of the five and the dice is this tomb tower where Suri Avamans' ashes are interred. So it's both a burial chapel to the greatest of all the Khmer kings and the greatest Hindu temple ever built. On that note, till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Durempul.

You know,