Organization of the Khmer Empire at Its Zenith
At its summit was the king, the chakravartin (“universal ruler”), the raja-dhi- raja (“king of kings”). An earlier generation of scholars thought that he was considered a devaraja or “god-king,” but it is now known that this was wrong— the devaraja venerated by the kings of Angkor since the days of Jayavarman II was not human, but the animistic embodiment of the ancestors of the Khmer people.
Nonetheless, as described by Zhou Daguan, the ruler was a vastly impressive figure:Only the ruler may wear fabrics woven in an all-over pattern. On his head he carries a diadem much like those worn by the vajradhara [one of the names of the Eternal Buddha]; at times he lays aside the diadem and weaves into his hair a garland of fragrant blossoms reminding one of jasmine. Round his neck he wears some three pounds of great pearls. On his wrists, ankles, and fingers he wears bracelets and rings of gold, all set with cat's eyes. His feet are bare. The soles of his feet and the palms of his hands are stained with henna.[1247]
On leaving the palace, the king carried the Preah Khan, the sacred golden sword that was the palladium of the Khmer state (this existed until the twentieth-century wars in Indochina, when it was stolen).
Twice daily, according to Zhou, the king gave audience, standing in a golden window (probably fronting on the Elephant Terrace), and holding the Sacred Sword. Distant music could be heard within the palace, then, at the sound of conch shells, the curtains were drawn apart, revealing the sovereign.
All present—ministers and commoners—j oin their hands and touch the earth with their foreheads, lifting up their heads only when the sound of conchs has ceased. The sovereign seats himself on a lion's skin, which is an hereditary royal treasure. When the affairs of state have been dealt with, the King turns back to the palace, the two girls let fall the curtain, and everyone rises.
From all this it is plain to see that these people, though barbarians, know what is due to a Prince.[1248]The entire palace area was surrounded by a high laterite wall pierced by two gates on the north and two on the south, with a fifth, ceremonial entrance on the east, fronting the reviewing stand (the Elephant Terrace). Within it was the palace proper, constructed of wood and roofed with both ceramic and lead tiles; six bathing pools; and the king's ancestral temple (the Phimeneakas). In the women's quarters lived the Queen Mother, the principal wife, and four lesser wives, not to mention the royal harem. There was a virtual army of servants, dancers, and musicians—Zhou claims there were at least 2,000 women who worked in the palace, but many of these were day-commuters.
A Khmer king was well-prepared for his tasks—as an aspirant prince, he had been educated by a royal guru (teacher) from the age of 11 to 16, and undoubtedly was fully familiar with the major Sanskrit texts of Hinduism, including the Arthashastra, an Indian instruction for statecraft, economic policy, and military strategy. In part it is not dissimilar to Machiavelli's The Prince, although far more wide-ranging. At the summit of the king's coterie of Brahmin advisors was the purohita, a priest-chaplain to the sovereign who wielded much political power—the Khmer counterpart to such European politician-clerics as Cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu. Other high-ranking clerical staff were the hotar, originally a sacrificer or offerant who invokes the gods of the Rigveda; and the acharya, a guide or instructor in religious matters.
Although the king was the theoretical owner of all land in the empire, he had his own royal lands, and also endowed and supervised numerous religious foundations and their temples throughout Kamujadesa. The empire was divided into provinces (called either praman or visaya); Zhou claimed that there were 90 of these, but contemporary scholars have whittled this down to 23, representing the number of images of a specific Mahayanist deity that Jayavarman VII distributed throughout the empire.
Each province was in turn divided into villages (sruk or grama). At the head of a village was a headman, khlon sruk, who was in fact a royal agent. The entire provincial bureaucracy consisted of appointed mandarins whose job was to ensure that revenues—rice, goods, and corvee labor—flowed smoothly up through the system. In a moneyless economy, this was how a top-down government functioned, and how important provincial families flourished. In a particular sruk would be a leader in charge of corvee labor and military conscription; the superintendent of a temple; and the chief of the rice fields. Some of the greatest religious establishments were extremely wealthy, and could count on the proceeds of many villages: for example, according to an inscribed stele, the Mahayana Buddhist monastery of Ta Prohm, in Angkor, received the revenue of 3,140 villages.It will be remembered that Suryavarman I received the loyalty oath of 4,000 tamrvach. These were roving middlemen between the palace and the provinces, inspectors whose role was to ensure that royal laws and decrees were carried out to the letter; they undoubtedly would have smelled out any brewing rebellion. The Khmer king was the defender and promulgator of all law. The royal law courts were present on every level right down to the village, and their domain included the settling of boundary disputes.
Tax and census data were carefully kept, but since these were written on perishable paper in a tropical, lowland climate, we have none of these. According to Zhou, during the ninth month of the ritual calendar, the entire population would be summoned to the capital, and pass in review before the royal palace. By this, he must have meant “heads of families,” since the population of the city of Angkor alone probably numbered at least 750,000 souls, according to modern archaeological estimates. Even then, one suspects that this may be hyperbole thought up by his local Chinese informants.
One problem in Angkorean society that has long been debated is that of slavery. The Old Khmer word usually translated as “slave” is khnum, but is this what it really meant? We know from Zhou's descriptions and elsewhere that captive Mon-Khmer tribal people from the uplands led a miserable life as household slaves of the Khmer. But in the Khmer inscriptions the word khnum is applied to temple personnel and others attached to religious foundations, suggesting that these people (many of them musicians and dancers) were in reality only “slaves” of the god housed in the temple.