THÔNG TIN TÀI LIỆU
empires and dynasties: Asia and the Pacific 369 ils of southern India regained a political foothold in northern Sri Lanka There they founded the Jaffna kingdom and began a series of raids against their Sinhalese neighbors from their regional power bases in Kandy in the hills of central Sri Lanka and Kotte in the south near present-day Colombo Cambodia The Angkor state, centered in present-day Cambodia, was founded by King Jayavarman II (r ca 802–50), who celebrated the unity of the Khmer people as the result of the favor of the Hindu god Shiva Angkor remained the realm’s capital under Yasovarman I (r 889–910) Suryavarman I (r 1010–50) extended Angkor’s territory in all directions and consolidated its political authority; Suryavarman II (r 1113–50) defended Angkor against its neighbors in the kingdom of Champa in central Vietnam and also sponsored the construction of the Angkor Wat temple complex, dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu In 1177 the Champa king’s forces raided Angkor, desecrated its temples, and carried off the state’s wealth and significant numbers of its population Jayavarman VII (r 1181–1215?) restored order and built a new capital city adjacent to Angkor Wat at Angkor Thom, which he centered on the Bayon Mahayana Buddhist shrine Following the death of Jayavarman VII the Angkor state steadily declined The armies of the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya, based in former Angkor territories in the north and west, sacked the Angkor capital in 1431 and brought an end to the Khmer Empire (802–1432) They carried Angkor’s royal regalia back to the Thai capital on the lower Chao Phraya River, where it remains to this day as the symbolic source of Thai political authority Bagan Myanmar (Burma) Bagan, Myanmar’s first inclusive state (ca 800–1280), was centered in the middle of the Irrawaddy River basin Buddhism always provided the economic and conceptual bases for Myanmar sovereignty Bagan’s cultural diversity and Buddhism had their roots in the early Mon Mahayana Buddhist tradition, which flourished in modern-day lower Myanmar and Thailand In 1057 Anawrahta (r 1044–77) annexed the southern part of Myanmar and its Mon culture, which allowed him to promote Theravada Buddhism as the source of cultural unity in the core agricultural zones that surrounded his court Theravada Buddhist monasteries and temples in the court complex and elsewhere received strategic allocations of land rights and labor for resettlement The Buddhist institutions in turn asserted their leadership in the development of new irrigation networks and wet-rice agriculture Eventually the competition for power between the kings of Bagan, the wealthy Buddhist religious organizations, and each side’s network of supporters brought down the Bagan state Succession in Angkor Although there are many records of the kings of the medieval Cambodian kingdom of Angkor, some writers have suggested that royal succession was not through the male ancestral line but through the men who married into a female matrilineal line of descent This certainly explains various succession crises in Angkor, but it cannot explain the absence of references to females in many of the surviving genealogies One of the usurpers in Angkor was King Suryavarman I, a Buddhist, who managed to take over several of the small kingdoms that had developed in eastern Cambodia in the late 10th century He seems to have been a powerful military figure, and his reign is officially stated to have begun in 1002, but it was not until nine years later that his supporters swore an oath to him, according to the surviving inscription in the royal palace of Angkor The manner of his claim to the throne was twofold He himself traced descent from Prithivindradevi, the mother of King Indravarman (r 877–90), and his wife was a descendant of Harshavarman I (r 900– ca 922) This made him, at best, the fifth cousin of his immediate predecessor A close study of his circle of patronage shows that Suryavarman I was clearly from an elite family, with some royal heritage, who managed to involve himself in a number of political coalitions to establish powerful friends at the court at Angkor and use his power to cajole others to support him in what essentially was a coup d’état, made possible by the collapse of social order in the capital, and his promise to restore law and order He certainly achieved the latter during his reign, which lasted until 1050 A Mongol invasion in 1287 destroyed the remnants of the Bagan kingdom, and a new Burmese dynasty emerged by the end of the 15th century at Toungoo in the southwest The new dynasty was vigorously expansionist and regularly went to war against the neighboring Thais, in part in order to dominate the high volume of international trade in the upper Bay of Bengal Java Sanjaya (r 732–60), a patron of the Hindu god Shiva, was the first significant ruler of Java He built his court and the first of Java’s sprawling temple complexes on the sacred Di-
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