REGIONAL GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCE ON TWO KHMER POLITIES

Another version of the myth from Cambodian folklore states that Preah Thaong arrived at the land of the thlok tree only to find it under the rule of a Cham king. Through trickery and war Preah Thaong overthrew the Cham king and gained the throne. In some variations of this story, the Cham king retreated to Champassak in modern-day Laos, where he gathered a Laotian army and forced Preah Thaong to retreat. Preah Thaong then counter-attacked at and besieged the Cham king. Through the intercession of Cham mandarins, the Cham king agreed to divide his kingdom, and Preah Thaong was granted "the place of the thlok tree."12

Royal Cambodian annals that date at least to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contain similar explanations for the origin of the Khmer. One story in the annals identifies Preah Thaong as an exiled son of a foreign king and credits him with defeating the native king who had ruled the land of the thlok. Upon his victory, Preah Thaong married a naga princess, and the king of the nagas created a kingdom called Kambuja for Preah Thaong by swallowing the sea1·* A variation on this account, also found in the annals, describes Kambu Svayambhuva, the king of a land called Aryadesa, who wandered in sorrow through a land of sand and rock after the death of his wife. Kambu stumbled upon a cave, entered it, and discovered the naga underworld. Kambu married the daughter of the naga king, who turned the desert into a beautiful land that became known as Kambuja.14

The Khmer origin myth is remarkably consistent over many sources and time periods, and it reflects significant geographic influences on the early Khmer polity of Funan. In the myth, a man traveling by sea indicates a coastal area, and his arrival at a place inundated by water where serpent gods control floods and fertility suggests that agriculture in this location depended on the floodwaters brought by the annual monsoon. A complex society like Funan, with its high population densities, ceramic and metallurgical technology, and a hierarchical social structure, would have required food-surplus rice agriculture.15 Van liere believes that surplus food production first arose in the region approximately two thousand years ago in the flood-prone alluvial plains of the lower Mekong river, near the coast of the South China Sea, with the use of broadcast rice. Rice production further inland to the north and west was avoided until the eighth century A.D. because of the effort required to clear densely vegetated interior lowland forests.16 Even today Cambodia's zones of productive agriculture are restricted to lowland areas, where flooding maintains soil fertility but makes careful control of water for bunded-field irrigation difficult.17

The ability of the Khmer between two thousand and fifteen hundred years ago to produce a surplus of food in the alluvial plain of the Mekong made it the most important location of early Khmer settlement and permitted the development of a complex society like Funan. Inscriptions dated prior to 1,000 A.D. indeed indicate a concentration of Khmer in this area - "the modern provinces of Takeo, Prei Veng, Kompong Speu, and Kampot, with an extension northward along the Mekong through Kompong Cham as far as Kratie."18