The Khmer Empire: Angkor Wat

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: @TheAncientsPodcast https://www.youtube.com/@TheAncientsPodcast MORE The Romans and India with William Dalrymple Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-romans-and-india-with-william-dalrymple/id1520403988?i=1000668187744 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0RSacQ0ngYW2YjrE2UMeVF Prehistoric Ireland: Newgrange Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/prehistoric-ireland-newgrange/id1520403988?i=1000704905645 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5zcgcrW1h1pZpirb1hhmLV Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor and producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The 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: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

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  In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie, and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.

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• 2:18Tristan Hughes?

  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 South East Asia in the first millennium AD. And guys, it's a fascinating story. Interactions with great kingdoms like the Khmer and the Srivijaya, the creation of Angkor Wat and so much more. That is all to come in today's episode and I really do hope you enjoy. Let's go.

• 3:11Tristan Hughes?

  In the early first millennium AD, precious metals were flowing into India.

• 3:18Tristan Hughes?

  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 South East 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 South East Asian empires of the time, which would ultimately lead, several

• 4:03Tristan Hughes?

  centuries later, to the construction of the great wonder in Cambodia today that is Angkor Wat. This is the story of how that wonder came about with our guest, William Dalrymple.

• 4:18Tristan Hughes?

  William, Mr Dalrymple, it is great to have you back on the podcast.

• 4:22Speaker 05

  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, listening on a loop to the ancient. So it's a great pleasure to appear on it.

• 4:32Tristan Hughes?

  Well, we are the number one, very nerdy ancient history podcast and proud. That is our mission. We are talking about Angkor Wat today and also the journey to how Angkor Wat emerges. I mean, it's extraordinary structure. Is it the biggest Hindu temple in the world?

• 4:48Speaker 05

  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. And just to give you the scale of it, I think Angkor Wat is not just the biggest Hindu temple in the world, it's the biggest medieval religious structure in the world, anywhere. The area within the moat of Angkor Wat is four times the size of the Vatican City.

• 5:13Speaker 05

  And these figures obviously are estimations, 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?

• 5:29Tristan Hughes?

  Yes. It's funny, isn't it, when you look at those other places in the world? Sometimes we get obsessed with Rome having 1 million people, but then you look at a place like in Mesoamerica, like Teotihuacan, or, as you say, or Angkor Wat 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 South East Asia.

• 5:52Speaker 05

  An extraordinary topic and one that leads us on very much from your favourite 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 5th century, the great Red Sea ports, which generations, 400 years of Indian sailors have been travelling backwards and forwards from Kerala, from Gujarat, from mouth of the Indus and Send, all the way to the Red Sea. The ports on the Red Sea coast, Berenike and Myasomas, are abandoned.

• 6:30Speaker 05

  Possibly, some are just now thinking about the Justinian plagues 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 Sassanian Persian blockade, which stops a lot of the Western ships easily reaching India. And we have, from Buddhist sources, clear evidence of enormous rivalry between Persian and Byzantine. 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 the 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

• 7:15Speaker 05

  to look at their coins. And according to the Greek sources, they had better, more perfect gold than, and better minting than the Persians. So he decides to, in this telling of the story, to go with the Greeks. But, 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 had been running down are abandoned. Now, this produces a considerable economic crisis in India. For 400 years, the ancient Indians had been a bit like the Saudis today. They barely had to get out of bed. Just like the Saudis can sort of drill an oil well and then just sort of go back to sleep for the rest of

• 7:56Speaker 05

  the year. So in antiquity, Indians were having gold pouring in with these great fleets of 250 vessels arriving in Mozesiris or in Gujarat. All they needed to do was find a few elephant tusks and some pepper and some cotton to sell. And judging by the prices given in this wonderful document, the Mozesiris 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 Lolina Polina, used to turn up at Roman parties with

• 8:37Speaker 05

  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.

• 8:47Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 8:48Speaker 05

  Which is a lovely story.

• 8:49Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, that is quite the flex, yes.

• 8:51Speaker 05

  And we get from Pliny this idea that all the gold of Rome, all the savings are being wasted by, you know, 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 highfalutin society women who appear, he says, in this, what he regards as porno clothing, which is silk. You know, you can see through it, is Pliny's 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 food.

• 9:34Tristan Hughes?

  Porno silk and woke pepper.

• 9:37Speaker 05

  Woke pepper, the kind of nonsense the young today are getting up to, putting pepper on their, 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 Nadu and Karnataka, in other words, the far south and the centre of India, you have these trading guilds. And some of them are really quite kick ass. There's this group called the 500, who sound suspiciously like the iron bank in Game of

• 10:22Speaker 05

  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 corps 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 South East Asia. And so the 500 basically pivots eastwards.

• 10:58Speaker 05

  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 nard from the Himalayas, which is a sort of musk, and malabathram, which is another thing used in Roman perfumery. All these luxuries have stopped coming. And the 500 pivot eastwards. And you see in the fifth and sixth century, the ports of Mammalapuram, south of Madras, and Nagapatnam, further south, begin to grow. And the 500 and the other trading guilds begin to settle on the estuaries of Southeast Asia.

• 11:39Speaker 05

  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 Buddhist, 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.

• 12:19Speaker 05

  And so from the fifth and sixth century, particularly in Puebama, on the coast of Malaysia, on the Malacca Straits, and most spectacularly at a site called Ok Eo, which is now in Vietnam, and Angkor Bore, 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 are 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 fifth century. And some of the earliest ones are in Java, where you have this character called Mullavaman,

• 13:04Speaker 05

  which is a Sanskrit name, talking about his granddad, who's called Godunga, which is a Southeast Asian indigenous name. So it's not that we've, that there's been any sort of invasion of Indians. It's just that the locals have adopted Sanskrit.

• 13:18Tristan Hughes?

  So Brahmins, 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.

• 13:28Speaker 05

  So they are the topmost caste, 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 have, 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 a Godunga sitting with your soldiers, controlling a waterfront estuary where traders are turning up. Suddenly, you are Mullavaman and you have a relationship with Lord Shiva.

• 14:12Speaker 05

  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 Poo, Mon, Khmer, Thai, all these different scripts develop from this South Indian version of Brahmi 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,

• 14:56Speaker 05

  you rip it. So a new form of Brahmi is developed that has these curve 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 generously guarded by the Brahmins for holy purposes, and is the language in which the early hymns the Vedas are written. By the fifth and sixth century, which is exactly the period that these Indians are beginning to appear in some numbers in Southeast Asia, and we find their DNA in the archaeological record, there are different chromosomes appearing in bones at this period from Indian groups, not all

• 15:41Speaker 05

  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.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  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 sixth 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

• 16:32Speaker 05

  in the Khmer Kingdom, which is the most powerful Hindu kingdom in Southeast Asia, which gets going in the seventh 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 Sanskrit. 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 Indian ones, whereby they're boasting about their literacy in this language. Just like, I suppose, Tagore mastered English and wrote, you know,

• 17:14Speaker 05

  better than many English people, and more recently, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie mastered English and beat the English to the Booker Prize many years. So in Southeast Asia at this period, in the sixth, seventh, eighth centuries, you have the Khmers taking to this like ducks to water. And one of the most beautiful little temples in Southeast Asia is a place called Bante Sre, not far from Angkor Wat, 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,

• 17:59Speaker 05

  but which, you know, somehow are being celebrated here on the Mekong. And so it's extraordinary. I mean, 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 fifth, sixth century, up to the 12th century, is Southeast Asians 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.

• 18:43Speaker 05

  And they master it and make it their own. And very soon, you find that in, 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 samphot, which is the particular Khmer waist wrap. He has the physiognomy of a Khmer, not a, not an Indian. And then something even stranger happens. Within, by the ninth century, you have two great kingdoms in Southeast Asia. You have Srivajaya in what's now Indonesia, which is like a sort of maritime confederacy. They control all shipping coming backwards and forwards along the Malacca Straits. And if anyone doesn't pay the toll, they- It's a thalasocracy, I think. It's a thalasocracy, that wonderful word that we have too few options to.

• 19:27Speaker 05

  We're coming to the other great word later on, which is quincux, 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 as modern Indonesia. Then on the mainland, you have a rival kingdom, which is the Khmers, which starts in Cambodia, but bros 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,

• 20:09Speaker 05

  and larger Hindu monuments being built in Cambodia. And contrary to what, you know, many nationalistic Indians are taught in their history textbooks, the greatest and most powerful Hindu empire in the world is probably not the Gupta's. It's actually the Khmers. The Khmers have a greater land area under their direct control and administration than the Gupta's.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini.

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• 22:14Tristan Hughes?

  So is this the context with the Srivijaya in Indonesia Buddhist? Is that the context? I'm guessing you've got that great monument of Borobudur there. But with the Khmer, that great land power as Hindu at that time, is that the context for the building of Angkor Wat?

• 22:30Speaker 05

  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, Jayavaram II, 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 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 take it 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.

• 23:15Speaker 05

  That's simplifying a long and complex inscription, which is the most argued about artefact in Southeast Asian history. And I'm sure Khmer specialists will be arguing with each one of those individual items I just said. But there it is, that Jayavaram II claims to have been a hostage in Java. The Java he talks about is now thought to be Java, rather than there's some theories where they could be different places. And he founds the Khmer Empire. And it's quite likely, given the chronology, that he had seen Borobudur 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 Kulin, which is a great place to go.

• 23:59Speaker 05

  It's a day's journey north of Simri, where Angkor is. It was the last stronghold of the Khmer rule. So you have to be quite careful, there's still landmines 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 a motorbike and bribe them to drive you through non-minefield areas. But when you get there, there in the jungle is this step pyramid. And it's very exciting to arrive scootering over watercourses and through almond orchards and all the rest of it.

• 24:33Speaker 05

  And there, on the top of it, is the plinth into which the Devrajah, 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 Pnomkulun, hill of the Liches, the Angkor dynasty, over the next 300 years, spreads out. You have three or four different capitals, all in the area of Simreap. So if you're staying in Simreap, you can see all these sites in succession. And Simreap is the base, if you want to go and explore this history, which is fabulous. It's one of the great, great discoveries you'll make of our time. And what's lovely is that because of the Khmer Rouge and because of all that horrific

• 25:17Speaker 05

  history in the 1970s, this is all at the beginning of its scholarship. And people now, working with Lida, studying the shapes that are coming up through Lida in the jungle, are coming up with whole new lost cities that we didn't know about there. It's on the Amazon. It is, it's the same, it's the same sort of idea, exactly like that. And this brilliant hydraulic civilization develops, which is initially based on foreign trade with Srivajaya and with the Cholas, who are now taking over southern India. But it sort of becomes more and more self-supporting as agriculture develops more and more hydraulic sophistication.

• 26:00Speaker 05

  And by the end, they're now talking about maybe three harvests a year, credible control of water to grow rice that can feed millions of people. And when you look from Pnomkulun down, from this cliff, onto the plain leading towards Simreap, you can see for hundreds of miles, but certainly tens of miles, these remains of dams and sluices and road systems. It's highly, not an 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.

• 26:41Speaker 05

  That'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 great scholarly debates is how Indian is it? Because it's Hindu. It's not Hinduism by this 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 caste. And so there's all sorts of differences. And the architectural forms, which initially are closely based on Pallava 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

• 27:22Speaker 05

  in the 1920s Tagore turns up in Angkor Wat, 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?

• 27:43Tristan Hughes?

  So who is the person who then orders the building of Angkor Wat, presumably initially as this great Hindu centre?

• 27:49Speaker 05

  So that is Surya Varman II, who is the, if Charlemagne is Jaivamman II, I suppose Richard the Lionheart or Beaumont?

• 28:00Tristan Hughes?

  Too medieval for me. I'm struggling.

• 28:03Speaker 05

  Barbarossa, one of those characters. Yeah. Saladin, maybe Saladin. Anyway, Surya Varman 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 ancient sort of megalithic sites, it's all arranged with the setting sun and the rising sun.

• 28:25Tristan Hughes?

  It's like New Grange or Mays Hall.

• 28:26Speaker 05

  New Grange, but on 10,000 times the scale. And if you go to Angkor Wat, you can get up if you could be asked at sort of four in the morning and see the sun rise over the central tower of the quincunx, which is the second great word. Quincunx is the, the shape of Angkor Wat, 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, Surya Varman II. 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 ghats, next to the river, or in a chatri, in a cenotaph.

• 29:11Speaker 05

  But Angkor, more like a stupa in a sense, like a, more like a Buddhist stupa. The ashes are in the centre. And originally, Angkor 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 ninth, 10th, 11th, and finally 12th centuries, Hinduism begins to die out in Cambodia and the Khmer lands. And Surya Varman is, in a sense, the peak moment of Hinduism, after which Buddhism is triumphant.

• 29:54Speaker 05

  And Jayavarmen VII, who builds the byon, is a Buddhist.

• 29:59Tristan Hughes?

  Do we know much about the building of Angkor Wat itself, like the local building materials? I mean, you mentioned how, yes, aligned with the sun, almost like New Grange into Mays Howe. 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 Angkor Wat?

• 30:17Speaker 05

  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 Angkor because it is a spectacular site. And there's a wonderful centre of scholarship in Siem Reap, which is the French Eco France Extreme Orient, 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 and orthographically 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

• 31:02Speaker 05

  about the construction process or the shifts of the workers or how long it took. We estimate probably 50 years, but, which is about the same as one of the great Gothic cathedrals.

• 31:11Tristan Hughes?

  Wow. And also, so the imagery within Angkor Wat, 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?

• 31:24Speaker 05

  There's an extraordinary extent to which the imagery within Angkor is the core Hindu text drawn up in North India in the first and second centuries. We've talked before about the, about Mathura and the Kushans. So during that period, you get the stories of Krishna and the Yadav clan incorporated into the Mahabharata. That's all there in Angkor. And we have a spectacular, whole, long corridor full of the Battle of Kurukshetra, which is this sort of Ragnarok, the great apocalypse battle of the Mahabharata. But you also have another equally long corridor, but, you know, not quite half a mile, but heading on for that long.

• 32:07Speaker 05

  These are very, very long sculptures in tiny shallow relief, beautifully done, which shows the other great battle of the Indian epics, which is the Ramayana War, when they tried to rescue Sita from Ravenna in Lanka. And that's all there over a different wall. And then we get the stories of Krishna. So all these stories, which were dreamt up in and around Delhi and Mathura and the Doab, appear transplanted 6,000 miles to the east, but perfectly faithfully represented in Angkor Wat.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.

• 33:23Speaker 06

  What started the civil war? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America?

• 33:35Speaker 06

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• 34:23Tristan Hughes?

  When he's built Angkor Wat, 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 Angkor Wat for Surya Vaman II?

• 34:36Speaker 05

  So, yes, so the central area of Angkor, which is the area within the moat, is the sacred zone. And that is the area which was reserved for ceremonial and ritual purposes, and where ultimately Surya Vaman is buried. Beyond that, though, you have Greater Angkor, which is an area which ultimately may well have extended almost as far as Phnom Koulum, where Jaivaman 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

• 35:20Speaker 05

  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.

• 35:36Speaker 05

  And it lasts, you know, it's the great kingdom of its day and the Chinese come and are dazzled by it. 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 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 Jaivam and the Seventh, and he drives the chams out.

• 36:19Speaker 05

  And if you go to the Bayon, which is Angkor Thom, the neighboring site, 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. There's 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 sight.

• 37:01Tristan Hughes?

  I've never had the chance to actually go, but I think you emphasized another key point there. The fact that, you know, it is more than just the central temple itself. I mean, Angkor Wat is the center of a whole massive, beautiful city.

• 37:11Speaker 05

  So Angkor Wat is one site in Siem Reap among, I don't know, seven or eight Khmer capitals. There's all these different, all these different successive capitals, of which Phnom Kulin is the first and the Bayon is the last. And successive Khmer kings will, you know, 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 from modern Siem Reap, where all the hotels. The bars, restaurants are where you can hang out between these visits are eight

• 37:51Speaker 05

  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 Angkor Wat is any one of them. Angkor Wat is just as enormous as it is, is only one of a vast number of cities founded by successive kings of the dynasty.

• 38:10Tristan Hughes?

  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 Angkor Wat and the Khmer Empire and the names of rulers that I'm not going to repeat because I struggle too much.

• 38:26Speaker 05

  Your friend Surya Venkates.

• 38:27Tristan Hughes?

  Surya Venkates, 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.

• 38:39Speaker 05

  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. Been totally wiped out by the idea of the Silk Road, which has been so dominant for 40 years, and I would argue is wrongly so before the 12th century because it's actually India and Rome, and it's over the seas, not over land. 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 Nadu looking down to the Malacca Straits, the Mekong Delta.

• 39:24Speaker 05

  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 Ayodhya, the capital of Lord Ram, which is today in Uttar Pradesh, a new Ayodhya is founded outside what is now Bangkok. A new Kurukketa, 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, Me Kong.

• 40:09Speaker 05

  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 Maaganga. And at the Phnom Kulin, where the, one of the headwaters of the Mekong emerges from a spring, someone has carved the riverbank with lingams and yonies, this male and female principle, in other words, sacralising the water and turning it into an Indian holy river as it emerges from the ground.

• 40:35Tristan Hughes?

  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...

• 40:43Speaker 05

  My book is called The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed 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.

• 40:55Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 41:06Tristan Hughes?

  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 South East Asia in the first millennium AD, influencing the great kingdoms of the Khmer and the Srivijaya, ultimately culminating in the building of great wonders like Angkor Wat, but also, of course, Borobudur in Indonesia too. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'm really glad we could cover the story of ancient South East 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 your podcasts.

• 41:50Tristan Hughes?

  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 enjoyed 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 History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. You can sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie, and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  It's one of the first times, really, that you consistently see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers. If I was going to define mathematics, I would say it's the study of structure.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  In Our Time, listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Tea or coffee? Love a cup of tea.