Dynastic History | Preah Khan, Angkor — The Stele in the Eastern Gateway and Its Own Arithmetic

On 13 November 1939 Maurice Glaize, then conservator of the Angkor park, was clearing the first eastern gateway of Preah Khan when he found a four-sided stone standing in it: 2.23 m high, 58 cm across, a lotus carved at the top, 179 stanzas of Sanskrit cut over its faces.

The text dates the consecration to the śaka year 1113, converted as 1191, though Thomas Maxwell's edition allows 1192. Jayavarman VII consecrated an image of Lokeśvara bearing his father's features, under the name Jayavarmeśvara, and called the place Nagara Jayaśrī, the city of the glory of victory. Then it counts. Two hundred and eighty-three gods stood around the central image. Five thousand three hundred and twenty-four villages were attached to this foundation alone, out of thirteen thousand five hundred assigned across the king's temples, and a hundred and twenty-one rest houses stood on the roads.

Those are the stele's figures, and the stele is the foundation describing itself in verse. The numbers are a claim about reach before they are a count of anything. What a village "attached" to a temple owed was rice, cloth, oil and labour, delivered on a schedule, and the people who owed it appear in the inscription as categories rather than as names. Maxwell's edition and translation in the journal UDAYA is where the text can be read; George Cœdès worked on the corpus before him.

The stele is now in the Angkor National Museum in Siem Reap, near the entrance. The temple it came out of was stabilised and never reassembled. The World Monuments Fund, at Angkor since 1989, handed Preah Khan back to the Cambodian authorities on 31 January 2024, together with Ta Som and the Churning of the Ocean of Milk gallery at Angkor Wat. Most of the collapse and most of the trees are where they were. Visitors walk in along the causeway, past the guardian figures either side of the door.

📸 Cover: the western entrance gopura of Preah Khan; the stele was found in the eastern gateway, Satdeep Gill, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons