The Ancients - The Khmer Empire: Angkor Wat

Episode Date: November 30, 2025

How did Indian culture shape the wonders of Southeast Asia?Tristan Hughes is joined by William Dalrymple to explore the fascinating first millennium AD, from vibrant trade dynamics with the Roman Empire to the establishment of powerful Indian trading guilds and the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism after Rome's decline. They dig in to the construction of the awe-inspiring Angkor Wat, the largest Hindu temple in the world which boasts a central area four times the size of Vatican City, with carvings depicting epic Hindu legends.Watch this episode on our NEW YouTube channel: @TheAncientsPodcastMOREThe Romans and India with William DalrympleListen on AppleListen on SpotifyPrehistoric Ireland: NewgrangeListen on AppleListen on SpotifyPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor and producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hello, I hope you're doing well. I'm all good here. I'm recording this from a hotel room in Edinburgh. I'm up here in my favourite city for a couple of days. And as a matter of fact, our guest today is a Scottish legend, none other than the author William Dalrymple. William's on the show today to talk through the spread of Indian religions and cultural aspects like literature and language into Southeast Asia in the first millennium AD. And guys, it's a fascinating story. Interactions with great kingdoms like Khmer and the Srivejaya, the creation of Ankhawat, and so much more. That is all to come in today's episode, and I really do hope you enjoy. Let's go. Trade with the Roman Empire to the West was massive, with Indians exchanging goods like ivory, pepper, cotton, diamonds and silk for Roman gold and silver. But then, as the centuries passed and Roman control in the eastern Mediterranean collapsed, this trade dried up. And instead, Indian merchants looked elsewhere for their gold, for trade. Their eyes landed on Southeast Asia,

And over the following centuries, powerful Indian trading guilds would establish strong connections in this part of the world. Indian culture followed, influencing the two great Southeast Asian empires of the time, which would ultimately lead, several centuries later, to the construction of the great wonder in Cambodia today that is Anchor Watt. This is the story of how that wonder came about, with our guest, William Dalrymple. William, Mr. Dalrymple, it is great to have you back on the podcast. It's a great pleasure. This is my favourite history podcast. And when I'm in this country, I go driving up and down the motorways,

listening on a loop to the ancient. So it's a great pleasure to appear on it. Well, we are the number one, a very nerdy ancient history podcast and proud. That is our mission. We are talking about Ankawatts today and also the journey to how Ankawatts emerges. It's extraordinary structure. Is it the biggest Hindu temple in the world? It is. The biggest Hindu temple in the world and the greatest Hindu empire in the world is not in India, but in Cambodia, in Indochina, in Indochina. And just to give you the scale of it, I think Ancourt is not just the biggest Hindu temple of the world, it's the biggest medieval religious structure in the world anywhere. The area within the moat of Ancourt is four times the size of the Vatican City.

and these figures obviously are estimates but archaeologists studying the hydrography and the system of water management and how the fields were they've come up with a figure of 1.2 million people in greater Angkor in the 12th century at a time when London is what, 20,000 people Yes, you know.

It's funny, isn't it? When you look at those other places in the world, sometimes we get obsessed with Rome having one million people but then you look at a place like in Mesoamerica like Taita Tua Khan or as you say or Anchor what in this case. And this also feels like a great topic through which to explore that very important topic, that is the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism deep into Southeast Asia.

An extraordinary topic and one that leads us on very much from your favorite period, Tristan. So it's the fall of Rome that leads Indian sailors eastwards. So what happens is that around the same time that Rome rolls up in the fifth century, the great Red Sea ports, so which generations, 400 years of Indian sailors have been travelling backwards and forwards from Kerala, from Gujarat,

from the mouth of the Indus and Sindh, all the way to the Red Sea. The ports on the Red Sea coast, Bernice, and Myos Hormus, are abandoned. Possibly, Samarker is now thinking about the Justinian plague as being the sort of period. Not immediately on the fall of Rome, but it dries up.

You get much less traffic. You also get a Sasanian Persian blockade, which stops a lot of the Western ships easily reaching India. And we have, from Buddhist sources, clear evidence of an enormous rivalry between Persian and Byzantine says. There's one story about a Byzantine ship which gets blown off course and lands in Sri Lanka. And we only have the Greek version of the story. And in their version, they arrive at the same time as a Persian ship.

And they're both hauled before the emperor. And the Persians say, we are the King of Kings, and the Greeks said, are, but we're much greater. And the Sri Lankan ruler asked to look at their coins. And according to the Greek sources, they had better more perfect gold and better minting than the Persians. So he decides to, in this telling the story, to go with the Greeks. So we certainly get an impression that there's rivalry, that the Persians are doing their best to block any shipping from the Red Sea getting into Indian waters. and certainly by the time of Justinian, possibly before that, these ports which have been running down, are abandoned. Now, this produces a considerable economic crisis in India.

For 400 years, the ancient Indians would be a bit like the Saudis today. They barely had to get out of bed. Just about the Saudis can sort of drill an oil well and then just sort of go back to sleep for the rest of the year. So in antiquity, Indians were having gold pouring in with these great fleets of 250 vessels arriving in. Muziris or in Gujarat, all they need to do is find a few elephant tusks and some pepper and some cotton to sell. And judging by the prices given in this wonderful document, the Miserius papyrus that allows economic historians now to give quite precise figures for the costs of all these Indian goods, they were basically hugely overpriced. And they were things that Romans showed off

about owning. So we have this nice story that one of Nero's mistresses, I think Lollina Polina used to turn up at Roman parties with Indian diamonds in her hair, with Indian garnets on her tummy button, with Indian pearls on her shoes. And she used to bring the receipts to parties to show people how much they'd cost. Wow. That is a lovely story. Yes, that is quite the flex, yes. And we get from Pliny this idea that all the gold of Rome, all the savings, are being wasted by these liberals in Rome. He's very much the North Italian admiral who regards the kind of liberals in the capital as the source of all evil. And he says, India is the drain of all the precious metals in the world. And he attacks these high flutin society women who appear, he says in this, what he regards is porno clothing, which is silk.

You know, you can see through it as Clinties complaint. And then he said, the only thing worse than this porno silk is this woke spice pepper, which the young are putting on their sauce on their food silk and woke pepper the kind of nonsense the young today are getting up to putting pepper on there why do they need this pungency he says i'm literally quoting this is absolutely the tone so having existed in a welter of roman gold for 400 years rome falls and roman gold ceases to turn up in india around the end of the fifth century and there's a major economic crisis because these guys have lost their main source of income. But luckily, by this time in what's now Tamil Nad and Karnataka, in other words, the far south and the center of India,

you have these trading guilds. And some of them are really quite kick-ass. There's this group called the 500, who sounds suspiciously like the Iron Bank in Game of Thrones. And the 500, if you look at the older history books, they sound quite boring. They just sound like, you know, traders. But if you look at some of the inscriptions and really go into it, they were clearly quite something. They have their core of assassins referred to in one inscription, whereby they go after anyone that's killed one of their members. They have, of course, archers and swordsmen, shieldmen to protect them in their trading. And they found their own fortified settlements like the East India Company in Southeast Asia. And so the 500 basically pivots eastwards.

gold is no longer coming in from Rome and the West. There's still a little bit coming from Persia. It's not like it's completely over. It's not a cataclysm. But the main source of income has gone. These Westerners who couldn't grow pepper, who loved silk, who loved cotton, who loved also gnaud from the Himalayas,

which is a sort of musk, and Malabathrim, which is another thing used in Roman perfumery. All these luxuries have stopped coming. And the 500 pivot eastwards. And you see in the 5th and 6th century the ports of Mamalapurum, south of Madras and Nagaputnam, further south, begin to grow.

And the 500 and the other trading guilds begin to settle on the estuaries of Southeast Asia. And they have their little settlements on the coast near the Malacca Straits in the Mekong Delta, near the gold mines of Sarawak. And we find these little Tamil inscriptions and touchstones of Tamil gold workers who have come along on these trips and are clearly working the gold at the site. And they become very powerful. And initially you have temples, both Hindu and Buddhists, being founded at the mouths of rivers in these estuary ports, apparently small and probably for the use of the Indians,

but in time it spreads and these religions take off. And so from the 5th and 6th century, particularly in Puebama, on the coast of Malaysia, on the Malacca Straits, and most spectacularly at a site called Oc-Eo, which is now in Vietnam, and Ancobaray, which is now in Cambodia, but both of which are on the Mekong Delta, you get signs of increasing Indian influence

in terms of merchants, but later in terms of Brahmins, who were reported by the Chinese ambassadors to be appearing in ever greater number at these courts, and you begin to get inscriptions in Sanskrit turning up from the 5th century. And some of the earliest ones are in Java, where you have this character called Mullah Vaman, which is a Sanskrit name, talking about his granddad, who's called Gudunga, which is a Southeast Asian indigenous name.

So it's not that there's been any sort of invasion of Indians, it's just that the locals have adopted Sanskrit. So Brahmas, I know they're an important kind of caste in Hinduism, but also they can be advisors, philosophical figures, kind of influential figures in society? So they are the topmost cast, they're the priestly caste. They are important because in Vedic Hinduism, unless you have a Brahmin making your sacrifice and aligning it with the heavens, the gods don't receive it. So they're a crucial mediator between God and man, and they speak the language of the gods,

which is Sanskrit. So these guys who are often at the same time the administrators of the kingdom, because they're literate, they arrive in Southeast Asia and they bring to the table a number of things. They first of all bring the idea of Hindu kingship. And so no longer are you just Kodunga sitting with your soldiers controlling a waterfront estuary where traders are turning up.

Suddenly you are Mullah Vaman and you have a relationship with Lord Shiva and these Brahmins not only bring administrative finesse from kingdoms in India, they bring literacy. And so we get this South Indian script, which is originally Palavagranta. This arrives in Southeast Asia, and this curve linear, these rounded letters, which you see developing in India into Tamil and Malayalam and

Kerala, form the basis of every single pre-Islamic script in Southeast Asia. So Pugh, Mon, Khmer, Thai, all these different scripts developed from this South Indian version of Burmni that's specifically developed to write on palm leaves. North Indian scripts have that straight line and the letters drop down. But if you do a straight line on a palm leaf, you rip it. So a new form of Brahmi has developed that has these curve, a linear circles, and you go round and round with these different letter forms. And this is what passes on to Southeast Asia. So first you get the traders, then you get the Brahmins, then you get literacy, and finally you get Sanskrit. So you get this language of the gods, which originally was only used for the Vedas,

was jealously guarded by the Brahmins for holy purposes, and is the language in which the early hymns the Vedas are written. By the 5th and 6th century, which is exactly the period that these Indians are beginning to appear in some numbers in Southeast Asia. We find their DNA in the archaeological record. There are different chromosomes appearing in bones at this period from Indian groups.

Not all of them, incidentally, Brahmins. We can tell that there are all sorts of Indians arriving. In the written sources, we just hear about Brahmins because they're writing about themselves. But the archaeology reveals there's actually all sorts of lower caste groups arriving at the same time and trading and intermarrying. And by the 6th century, Sanskrit is widely understood and widely learnt across Southeast Asia. And you have this period when Sanskrit becomes the language of culture and government for courts all the way from Kandahar to Bali. And it's used not just for sacred purposes, but in secular administration.

and for general high cultural purposes. So like Latin in the Middle Ages in Europe or like French in Russia in the 19th century, all educated people learn Sanskrit. And you get, particularly in the Khmer kingdom, which is the most powerful Hindu kingdom in Southeast Asia, which gets going in the 7th century and really accelerates until by the 12th century,

you've got Angkor Wat being built. In that kingdom, you have a real connoisseurship of Sandus. It's not that they're speaking sort of pigeon Sanskrit that's less good than the stuff that the palavas are writing over the sea in India. You get the impression that these guys are deeply proud of being part of this sophisticated culture. And so there's a kind of nerdiness about Khmer inscriptions that's not there often in India ones, whereby they're boasting about their literacy in this language. Just like, I suppose, Tagore mastered English and wrote better than many English people. and more recently, Aaron Dati Roy and Vikram Set and Salman Rushdie mastered English and beat the English to the Book of Prize many years.

So in Southeast Asia at this period, in the six, seven, eighth centuries, you have the Khmer's taking to this, like ducks to water. And one of the most beautiful little temples in Southeast Asia is a place called Bante Sray, not far from Ankara, far smaller, but it's the Prime Minister's private temple. And he puts up on one lintel the reading list that he wants his younger brother to learn. So you have him showing off all the different texts. And some of them are, you know, the kind of mainstream piranhas that you'd expect to find. Some of them are quite sort of niche Tamil Amma stories that were not even known in Andhra Pradesh, but which, you know,

somehow being celebrated here on the Mekong. And so it's an extraordinary, it's a rare moment in history because, as you know, from your wonderful podcast, most empires influence other places by conquering them and ruling over people. and importing their languages and their religions and their forms of administration. What you get in Southeast Asia in the 5th, 6th century up to the 12th century is Southeast Asia's taking to Indian languages, Indian religions, Indian philosophies, Indian artistic forms, Indian dance, Indian music, Indian temple shapes, not by conquest, but by sheer sort of a love of the cultural sophistication that they're witnessing.

And they master it and make it their own. And very soon, you find that within a generation or two, the images are specifically Khmer. That, you know, you couldn't possibly be done in India. There's something different that Vishnu's wearing a sun pot, which is the particular Khmer waistrap. He has the physiognomy of a Khmer, not an Indian. And then something even stranger happens. By the 9th century, you have two great kingdoms in Southeast Asia. You have Sriva Jaya in what's now in Indonesia, which is like a sort of maritime confederate.

They control all shipping coming backwards and forwards along the Malacca Straits. And if anyone doesn't pay the toll, they... It's a Thalisocracy kind of thing. That's a thalosocracy, that wonderful word, that we have two few options to... We're coming to the other great word later on, which is Quinkugs, but we'll save that for later. Two very good words for this podcast. Yes, it's a Thalasocracy, and that is largely Buddhist. And so you have this Buddhist Sea Empire based from Sumatra, but including Java and Borneo,

I mean Indonesia, very much on the same lineaments of modern Indonesia. Then on the mainland, you have a rival kingdom, which is the Khmerz, which starts in Cambodia, but grows out over modern Thailand, over Laos, over half of Vietnam, and is the great land empire. And by that period, you're getting larger Buddhist monuments being built in Java than ever existed in India and larger Hindu monuments being built in Cambodia. And contrary to what many nationalistic Indians are taught in their history textbooks, the greatest and most powerful Hindu empire in the world is probably not the Guptas. It's actually the Khmerz.

The Khmerz have a greater land area under their direct control and administration than the Guptus. So is this the context with the Srivigaya in Indonesia, Buddhist? Is that the context? I'm guessing you've got that great monument of Borobador there. But with the Khmer, that great land power as Hindu at that time, is that the context for the building of Anka Wat? So to get there step by step, so we get around the same sort of time as Charlemagne is taking on the Holy Roman Empire,

about 800 in Rome, a similar sort of character, Jaivam and the second, has come to power in Cambodia. And according to a much later source, we have one particularly detailed source, which, irritatingly, is 300 years after the events it described. So there's lots of scholarly ink spilled over how reliable it is and the particular biases of the high priest that wrote it. But if we had taken at face value, at least,

he says that I was a hostage in Java. I escaped and I came to the holy land of Cambodia and on the hill of the Liches at Phnom Kulin I founded the Angkor dynasty. That's simplifying a long and complex inscription which is the most argued about artefact in Southeast Asian history and I'm sure all commerce specialists will be arguing with each one of those individual items I just said.

But there it is that the Jivem and the 2nd claims to have been a hostage in Java. The Java he talks about is now thought to be Java, rather than the other than some of the theories that could be different places. And he founds the Khmer Empire. And it's quite likely, given the chronology, that he had seen Borobador when he was in Java and that he brings this idea of step pyramids to the Khmer heartland. And the first one, I have visited in Phnom Kulen, which is a great place to go. It's a day's journey north of Simripe and where Angkor is.

it was the last stronghold of the Khmer Rouge. You have to be quite careful. There's still landmines sort of dotted around the jungle. And this pyramid where he founded the Khmer dynasty does not have a road leading to it. So you have to go to the bazaar, find someone with the motorbike and bribe them to drive you through non-minefield areas. But when you get there in the jungle is this step pyramid.

And it's very exciting to arrive, scootering over watercourses and through Armandart Orchards and all the rest of it. And there on the top of it is the plinth into which the Devraja, which is the god king, which is now just thought to be a sort of form of a lingam, which is portable, but represented the king and the god in one image. And from that beginning, on Pernomkulam, the hill of the likees, the Angkor dynasty over the next 300 years, spreads out. You have three or four different capitals, all in the area of C.M. Reap.

So if you're staying in C.M. Reap, you can see all the, these sites in succession. And Simreep is the base if you want to go and explore this history, which is fabulous. It's one of the great, great sort of discoveries you'll make of our time. And what's lovely is that because of the Khmer Rouge and because of all that horrific history in the 1970s, this is all at the beginning of its scholarship. And people now working with LIDAR, studying the shapes that are coming up through LIDAR in the jungle, are coming up. with whole new lost cities that we didn't know about there. It's on the Amazon.

It's the same idea. Exactly like that. And this brilliant hydraulic civilization develops, which is initially based on foreign trade with Sriva Jaya and with the Cholas who are now taken over southern India. But it sort of becomes more and more self-supporting as agriculture develops more and more hydraulic sophistication. And by the end, they're now talking about,

maybe three harvests a year, incredible control of water to grow rice that can feed millions of people. And when you look from Phnom Kuland down from this cliff onto the plane leading towards Simripe, you can see for hundreds of miles, but certainly tens of miles, these remains of dams and sluces and road systems. It's high, not a inch of land is wasted. Every land is administered carefully and agriculture is controlled so precisely that you can get these massive crops that can support enormous urban populations. There's an extraordinary achievement and is the most advanced empire of the 12th century. There's nothing anywhere in the world that is as large or as sophisticated. And again, one of the kind of great scholarly debates is how Indian is it because it's Hindu.

It's not Hinduism by the stage of India. For example, there are female Brahmins, which you never get in. India. They eat pork. They drink beer. They don't have cast. And so there's all sorts of differences. And the architectural forms, which initially was closely based on palaver and then early chola forms by the 12th century have developed their own architectural history that's diverged quite a long way from Indian models. So when in the 1920s, Tagore turns up in Angkorat, he comes up with this brilliant sentence that sort of answers the arguments of 40 years of scholars arguing about this. He says, everywhere I could see

India, yet I could not recognize her. And that does it. That's exactly what it is. It's India, yet it's not India, you know. So who is the person who then orders the building of Anchor Watch, presumably initially, as this great Hindu center? So that is Saria Vaman II. If Charlemagne is Jaivarman II, I suppose Richard the Lionheart or Beaumont. It's too medieval for me. I'm struggling. Barbarossa. Barbarossa, one of those characters.

Saladin. Maybe Saladin. Anyway, Suri Varma II is this great conqueror. And he builds the largest Hindu temple in the world. And it is like many of the sites I've heard you talk about on the ancients of megalithic sites. It's all arranged with the setting sun and the rising sun. It's like New Grange, you're amazing. New Grange, but on sort of 10,000 times the scale.

and if you go to Ankhawatt, you can get up, if you can be asked at sort of 4 in the morning and see the sun rise over the central tower of the Quincunx, which is the second great word that we're going to get that. Quincunx is the shape of Ankhawat, which is like the five dots on a dice, with four satellite towers and then the central tower. But again, as a measure of how different Hinduism has become in the Khmer Empire,

the central tower contains the ashes in Suri of Alam in the second. Now, in a Hindu temple, you never have the ashes in the main temple. Ashes are considered unclean and polluting, and they're in on the gats next to the river or in a chatari in a cenotaph. But Angkor, more like a stupor in a sense, more like a Buddhist stupor. The ashes are in the center. And originally, Ankur is a Vishnu temple. Today, it's a Buddhist temple because Hinduism has disappeared from Southeast Asia,

just as Buddhism has largely disappeared. from India. And initially you have this world where Hinduism and Buddhism are coexisting in both places. But over the course of the 9th, 10th, 11th, and finally 12th centuries, Hinduism begins to die out in Cambodia and the Khmer lands. And Suria Vaman is in the sense the peak moment of Hinduism, after which Buddhism is drafted. And Jaya Vaman, the 7th, who builds the Bayon, is a Buddhist. Do we know much about the building of Anchorot itself, like the local building materials? I mean, you mentioned how, yes, aligned with the sun, almost like New Grange and to Mays, How.

But with those building projects, I always think about how much time and effort and how important the actual building was for those people. Do we know much about the actual construction of Anchorot? We don't actually have any inscriptions, I think, which give the sort of details that we'd like as archaeologists. We don't have the names of the Masons or the shifts in which they're working. But I think there's been a lot of work done on Anko, because it is a spectacular site, and there's a wonderful centre of scholarship in C.M. Reap, which is the French École Franca-France Extremerian, who've been studying this since the 1920s, I think. And there's an awful lot of work being done on it, but we don't actually have inscriptions that lay it all out

very neatly for us. The Khmer inscriptions are grammatically perfect, northographically perfect, and written in perfect Sanskrit, but they're quite opaque to us when they're giving the history, there's not the sort of details that we as historians long to know about the construction process or the shifts of the workers or how long it took. We estimate probably 50 years, which is about the same as one of the great Gothic cathedrals. Wow. And also, so the imagery within Anchorage, within the Great Temple itself, so within the Five Towers, is the imagery largely of Hindu mythology and the big stories and epics of Hindu mythology? There's an extraordinary extent to which the imagery within Angkor is, you know, the core Hindu text drawn up in North India in the first and second centuries.

We've talked before about the, about Matra and the Kushans. So during that period, you get the stories of Krishna and the Yadav clan incorporated into the Mahabharat. That's all there in Angkor. And we have a spectacular whole long corridor full of the back. Battle of Krukshetra, which is this sort of Ragnarok, the great apocalypse battle of the Mahabharata. But you also have another equally long corridor, about, you know, not quite half a mile, but heading on for that long. These are very, very long sculptures, and tiny shallow relief, beautifully done, which shows

the other great battle of the Indian epics, which is the Ramayana War when they're trying to rescue Sita from Ravana in Lankar, and that's all there over a different war. And then we get the stories of Krishna. So all these stories which were dreamt up in and around Delhi and Matara and the Doab appear transplanted 6,000 miles to the east, but perfectly, faithfully represented in Angkor. When he's built Ankhawat, is it functioning more than just a temple? Is this a place, an important place for him to reside in? And what do we know about that?

The importance of Ankhawat for Suria Vaman II. So, yes, so the central area of Ankur, which is the area within the moat, is the sacred zone. And that is the area which was reserved for ceremonial and ritual purposes. ultimately Suri-Varman is buried. Beyond that, you have greater anchor, which is an area which ultimately may well have extended almost as far as Pnom Kulam, where Jai Vaman II starts the empire 400 years earlier, where you have this, what was probably the largest urban area in the world in the 12th century, where you had these very highly organized groups of people living a sort of semi-urban,

semi-rural life where they were, everything was centered on rice. and the planting of rice and the transplantation of rice at the different times you have to drain the field and pick it and move it and split it and this is obviously raised to a high art

in Khmer civilization and it lasts it's the great kingdom of its day and the Chinese come and a dazzle by it and we have all these Chinese ambassadors accounts arguably the best narratives we have the best descriptions of the civilization of Angkor are by the

Chinese ambassadors who are coming down the Mekong and just sort of dazzled by this and surprised actually and slightly sort of slightly put out that this rival civilization has cropped up so close to their own borders. And it lasts for two or three generations. Then you get the chams from the coast of Vietnam come in and raid it. Then there's a Buddhist counterattack under Jaya Vama and the seventh and he drives the chams out. And if you go to the Bayon, which is Angkor Tom, the neighboring side. There are all these extraordinary, almost like strip cartoons of the campaign liberating Angkor from Vietnamese attack.

And so there's pictures of naval battles with great galleys, there's people drowning in the sea, the feasts afterwards when whole pigs are being dropped into vats and beer is being served to 10,000 people. And it's amazing. You can spend weeks just looking at the detail of the battles and the feasting and the traders coming and the people sitting around watching all this. It's a spectacular site. I've never had the chance to actually go,

but I think you emphasise another key point there, the fact that it is more than just the central temple itself. I mean, Anka Wat is the centre of a whole massive, beautiful city. So Anka Wat is one site in Seam Reap among, I don't know, seven or eight Khmer capitals. There's all these different, all these different successive capitals of which Pernom Kulin is the first

and the Bayon is the last. And successive Khmer Kings will just set off into the jungle and build yet another enormous step pyramid which will then be abandoned when he dies and in a very small area, visitable from modern Seam Reap where all the hotels and the bars and restaurants are

where you can hang out between these visits are eight or nine massive capitals, all of which represent one moment in the history of this dynasty. I mean, it's a long and complex site. But Anka Wat is any one of them. Ancoaught is just as enormous as it is, is the only one of a vast number of cities founded by successive kings of the dynasty. William, it is amazing to think that potentially that story that we've covered today over those centuries from the late ancient period into the medieval,

period, and ultimately the creation of Ankawat and the Khmer Empire and the names of rulers that I'm not going to repeat, because I struggle too much. Your friend, Suryavarman. That's a Suria Vaman. There we go. It's amazing to think that actually one of the origins points you can do for it, and as we've done today, is actually the end of Indian trade with the Roman Empire. I think it's one of the crucial moments of world history, because you have this forgotten

moment when India and Rome are each other's greatest trading partners. It's been totally wiped out by the idea of the Silk Road, which has been so dominant for 40 years. And I would argue it is wrongly so before the 12th century, because it's actually India and Rome, and it's over the seas, not overland. That's the thing that starts it. And then Rome falls, and India is forced to find a new trading partner. And you have this monumental pivot to the east. So from red sea ports facing Kerala, Gujarat and Sindh, you suddenly have the ports of Tamil Nad looking down to the Malacca Straits, the Mekong Delta. And on the way, and this is one of the crucial things, you have the reimagining of the landscape of Southeast Asia. So as Hinduism and

Sanskrit spreads, you find just like British people found a city called Perth in Australia and a New York on the Hudson. So with the Sanskritization of Southeast Asia, a new Ayodja, the capital of Lord Ram, which is today in Uttar Pradesh, a new Iodja is founded outside what is now Bangkok. A new Kuroksetra, which is the apocalyptic battle we were talking about, is founded in Laos. And down the middle of it, they have a new Ganga, and Ma Ganga is pronounced in Khmer, mechong. This is a disputed etymology, and some people would disagree with it,

but it seems, I think, pretty clear that Mekong is just the Khmer version of Margher. And at the Pernom Kulan, where one of the headwaters of the Mekong emerges from a spring, someone has carved the riverbank with lingams and yonis, this male and female prince, in other words, sacralizing the water and turning it into an Indian holy river as it emerges from the ground. Well, William, what a way to end this chat. It's been fantastic, once again, to have you on the podcast last, but certainly not least, your book is called.

My book is called The Golden Road, How Ancient India Transform the World. It's coming out in paperback in Britain, and it's published in hardback in the US, where you are now, I see very nearly the most popular podcast there. So congratulations, just you wait. I will get over to the States one day very soon, and I hope to. William, it just goes to me to say thank you so much once again for coming back on the ancients today. Thank you. Well, there you go. There was the one and only William Dalrymple, a good friend and a host of the hit podcast Empire, talking through how Buddhism and Hinduism spread to Southeast Asia in the first millennium AD, influencing the great kingdoms of the Khmer and the Srivigaya, ultimately culminating in the building of great wonders like Ankhawat, but also of course Borobudur in Indonesia too. I hope you enjoy this episode. I'm really glad we could cover the story.

of Ancient Southeast Asia in that episode today and I wish we'd had more time to interview William even more about it. It was a really fun episode and I really do hope you enjoyed. Thank you for listening. Now, please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. It'll also keep you notified when we release new episodes twice every week. If you enjoy the episode and you'd be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating too, well, we'd really appreciate that. Lastly, you can also sign up to for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. You can sign up at historyhit.com slash subscribe. That's all for me. I'll see you in the next episode.