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This is part one of a new three part introduction to Angkor and Khmer civilisation, if you are a long-time listener, please make sure to re-download this episode.

Time Period Covered: Pre-history – 850 CE

Who are the Khmer people, and where did they come from? What is the Tonle Sap, and why does it make Angkor possible? And why does almost everything written about early Cambodia need to be revised?

In this episode, Lachlan introduces the landscape, the people, and the deep history of the Khmer civilisation before the era of god-kings. The great lake that reverses its own river. The monsoon cycle that defines everything. The animist world of spirits and sacred hills that underlies all the religions that come later.

We examine what archaeology and inscriptions actually tell us about the pre-Angkorean period, and why the old frameworks of Funan and Chenla — borrowed from Chinese chronicles and repeated for a century — don't quite hold up. We look at the religions that shaped Khmer society: the local animism and neak ta spirit traditions, the arrival of Hinduism and Buddhism, and the way these traditions layered on top of each other rather than replacing each other.

The episode ends on Phnom Kulen, the sacred mountain, where a king named Jayavarman II performs a ceremony that declares him the universal monarch — the king above all kings — and sets in motion five centuries of Khmer greatness.

Sources
David Chandler A History of Cambodia
Coe and Evans Angkor and the Khmer Civilization

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Time Period Covered: 802 – 1296 CE

How do you build the largest city in the medieval world? What does it actually take to construct Angkor Wat? And what happens when the greatest king in Khmer history dies and leaves an empire stretched to its limits?

In this episode, Lachlan traces the rise of the Khmer Empire from Jayavarman II's ceremony on Phnom Kulen to the death of Jayavarman VII, the most prolific builder in Angkorean history. The three-step blueprint of the early kings — waterworks, ancestral temple, state temple. The building of Yasodharapura and the East Baray. The interlude at Koh Ker and why it failed. The mystery of Suryavarman I's blood oath and the patronage networks that held the empire together.

We cover Suryavarman II and the construction of Angkor Wat in detail — the labour, the materials, the corbelled architecture, the astronomical alignments, and the sheer organisational achievement of moving and placing millions of tonnes of stone. Then Jayavarman VII: the Cham sacking, the comeback, the building programme that outstripped every king before him combined, and the contradiction at the heart of his reign between compassion and extraction.

Sources
Chandler A History of Cambodia
Coe and Evans Angkor and the Khmer Civilization Hendrickson
Stark and Evans (eds) The Angkorian World
Tully A Short History of Cambodia