Figure 3. Print n. 1054-E K.600.Courtesy: École française d’Extrême-Orient

Антон Захаров
May 2019

..mentions house-serfs Ś ivad ā sa (Skr. ‘a slave of Shiva’) and Sa’uy (Old Khmer ‘a stinker’,

The earliest dated inscription of Cambodia K. 557/600 was found on an elevation Vằt Črôy on the right riverbank of the Angkor Borei River where an ancient urban site of the same name has been excavated by an American excavation team of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa under the direction of Miriam Stark (2003; 2004; 2006a–d) (see fig. 1). The inscription is dated from 611 CE. It is written in Old Khmer with Sanskrit loan-words and engraved in the Early Pallava script–a kind of Brahmi script.

Sanskrit personal names in Old Khmer inscriptions are always harmonious but their bearers carried out the same functions as those who had Old Khmer names and/or sobriquets. For ex-ample, the inscription K. 557/600 mentions house-serfs Ś ivad ā sa (Skr. ‘a slave of Shiva’) and Sa’uy (Old Khmer ‘a stinker’), rice-fields workers Jye ṣṭhahvarmma (Skr. ‘the best protector’) and Aras (Old Khmer ‘living, live’), female dancers Tanva ṅgī (Skr. ‘slender’) and Pit 'añ (Old Khmer ‘sealed by me (?)’).

The content of the Angkor Borei inscription K. 557/600 is a bestowal or granting which is at the same time a religious merit. All acts of bestowal mentioned in its text concern deities. In fact, the inscription has a dual nature. It is a record of juridical facts and of pious deeds that are inseparable of each other. The inscription gives no information what these merits are except bestowals and donations. The text contains repetitious formulae of land, cattle and rice-fields donations.

The objects of bestowing in the K. 557/600 are slaves or dependent peoples – men, women and children; cows and buffaloes, goats, coconut trees in groves and orchards, and rice-fields.

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