Jayavarman II
Jayavarman II declared himself universal monarch on a mountain in 802 and freed the Khmer from Java, and everything known about him was written by other people two centuries later. That is the difficulty: no inscription of his own survives, and the account of his reign comes from a stele carved at Sdok Kok Thom in 1052 by a family of priests recording their own services to the kings. It says he came from Java - which may mean the Sailendra kings of the Indonesian island or some other overlord to the south - to rule in the city of Indrapura. It says he moved his court four times through the wet-rice plains north of the Tonle Sap, gathering the small Khmer principalities that had fallen apart after the kingdom of Chenla split. On the summit of Phnom Kulen, north-east of what became Angkor, a Brahmin performed a rite that made him a chakravartin, a universal ruler, and instituted the cult of the devaraja, the god-king or king of the gods, so that Cambodia should no longer be dependent on Java and should have one lord who was chakravartin. The date is given as 802 and is the conventional beginning of the Khmer empire. He settled finally at Hariharalaya, near Roluos, where the earliest Angkorian temples stand, and died there around 835. His successors built the reservoirs, the temple-mountains and the capital at Angkor itself. Every one of them for six hundred years traced the legitimacy of the throne back to the rite on the mountain. Whether he was a conqueror, a returned hostage or a local chief with a good priest is not recoverable. What is, is that the Khmer state that built Angkor Wat and dominated mainland South-East Asia dated itself from him, and that its kings kept his name: five more Jayavarmans followed, the seventh of whom built Angkor Thom.
- Lived: 770 CE – 835 CE
- Nationality: Khmer
- Roles: king, monarch, head_of_state
