The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

CHAPTER 21
CAMBODIA:
THE ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF THE KHMERS
In i860 Henri Mouhot, a French botanist in
Siam, stirred by natives' reports of empty cities
lost in the jungle, pushed onward into the great
forests of the Mekong River, until, one burning
tropic dawn, he looked upon the incredible
spectacle of the towers of Angkor rising like
some fantastic mirage of mountain peaks above
the sea of jungle. There had, to be sure, been
discredited tales of vanished cities by Spanish
missionaries as early as the seventeenth century, !
but Mouhot's discovery was the first the
modern Western world knew of one of the great
civilizations of Asia.
Even until quite recently, after more than
eighty years of research had largely resolved
the problems of the history of the builders of
Cambodian civilization, it used to be fondly
believed - and the legend probably survives in
'science-fiction' - that the colossal ruins in
Indo-China were the work of a race whose
origins are as mysterious as its disappearance.
In this chapter we shall be concerned with tracing
the history of art in Cambodia, culminating
in the great monuments of Angkor.
I. THE PRE-KHMER PERIOD
According to Chinese legend, Funan, the most
ancient kingdom in present day Indo-China,
was founded in the first century A.D., when
a Brahmin adventurer, Kaundinya, espoused a
native princess; according to native variants of
the story, this princess was a nagini, one of those
half-human, half-serpentine beings, who in
India are the spirits of the waters.- This earliest
kingdom comprised the territory of Cambodia,
Cochin China, and southern Siam. Presumably
it marked a development from the earliest
settlements by peoples of Sino-Tibetan origin,
who even earlier had occupied the land around
the mouths of the Mekong and Menam rivers.
From this earliest period of Cambodian history
there is abundant evidence, both in the form of
finds, and of reports of Chinese visitors, to confirm
the close relations between the kingdom of
Funan, India, and China. 3 There are indications,
too, that during these same centuries
Indian colonists established themselves in many
parts of Cambodia and the Malay Peninsula;
indeed, the finds of sculpture in the style of the
Later Andhras in Java and even the
Celebes
indicate the extent of the spread of Indian
Buddhism and its art over all south-eastern
Asia. The kings of the earliest dynasty had
already adopted the Pallava patronymic
-vartnan (protector), a very sure indication of
the origins of their culture. All the monuments
of this pre-Khmer civilization of the fifth, sixth,
and seventh centuries point to the Indian origin
of this earliest style. Pre-Khmer or Indo-
Khmer is the name given to this period from the
first to the seventh century.
The earliest architecture of Cambodia, like
the population of the region, is a mixture of
indigenous elements and forms imported by
Indian cultural invasions. The temples consist
invariably of an isolated sanctuary, a form
determined by the necessity for individual
shrines to house the cult images of the deified
ancestors of the royal house. 4
The largest centres of what is properly called
Pre-Khmer civilization are located at Sambor