Dynastic History | Angkor Wat — The Repair Bill Cut Into the Wall in 1701

In 1701 a court official named Oknha Jaiya Nan had a poem in Middle Khmer cut into the east wall of Angkor Wat, between the bas-relief galleries. It is the longest Khmer inscription at the temple, and it is not a royal document. It records what he paid for: images of the Buddha there had been left broken into pieces, heads on the ground and arms pulled out, and he commissioned their repair, dedicating the merit to his wife and to two sons killed in fighting. Saveros Pou published the text, catalogued as IMA 38, in the Bulletin de l'École française d'Extrême-Orient in 1975.

The temple was raised as a Vishnu foundation for Suryavarman II in the first half of the twelfth century. From the late thirteenth it was used for Theravada worship, and the wall inscriptions surviving from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are mostly the records of monks and donors rather than of a chancery. IMA 27, dated 1661, has a monk arriving to pay homage at "Preah Angkor Wat". Japanese pilgrims of the seventeenth century left inscriptions of their own.

This is worth stating because of what is usually said instead. Angkor Wat was not lost and it was not found. Excavation inside the enclosure, published by Miriam Stark, Piphal Heng and Alison Carter in PNAS in 2019, found the temple grounds still occupied after the fifteenth century, once the court's attention and the trade had shifted south.

The temple stands inside the Angkor Archaeological Park, administered since 1995 by the APSARA National Authority. UNESCO's file for the property describes it as living heritage: people who live in the park hold ceremonies at these temples still.

📸 Cover: Angkor Wat from the west across the reflecting pool, Satdeep Gill, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons