The Khmer Army

Since military matters are largely absent in the Sanskrit and Khmer inscriptions, virtually everything that we know about the Khmer order of battle is based upon bas-relief scenes at Angkor Wat, the Bayon, and Banteay Chmaar.

The basic combat unit consisted of foot soldiers, mounted cavalry, and a high- ranking officer (or the king himself) mounted on a war elephant. The first were var­iously armed with an array of weapons, including lances, sabers, bows and arrows, knives and daggers, and by a kind of halberd. For protection they had round or long shields, and quilted jackets or cylindrical cuirasses. Cavalrymen rode bareback, and sometimes stood on their horses during combat.

As for battle commanders, they sat or stood on howdahs and wielded lances or halberds. In front of them sat the elephant’s mahout, also armed. The Asian ele­phant was a formidable presence in the armies of ancient India, Southeast Asia, the Near East, and the Mediterranean, until the advent of the cannon. It was gen­erally used to rush at and break enemy formations, and to inspire panic in both men and horses; it is no exaggeration to think of them as the ancient equivalent of the modern military tank. Its thick hide made it relatively impervious to ordinary arrows shot from bows. But the reliefs depict what must have been an extremely effective anti-elephant weapon: a kind of ballista, a doubled crossbow mounted on an elephant’s back, which would have fired arrows at tremendous force.

War elephants have some drawbacks, though. They can carry only one or two persons, and can travel only 24 to 50 kilometers (15 to 20 miles) a day, thus lim­iting the speed at which the entire imperial force could move to a trouble spot.

The army traveled with its own military bands of drums, gongs, and trumpets; heavy loads of supplies carried on ox-drawn wagons; live pigs (food on the hoof); and camp-followers—mainly women and children. The gods played a role, too, in these campaigns, as the army was accompanied by Brahmin priests who tended the ark of the Sacred Fire, kept in a special palanquin. While the main body of the army was made up of conscripts from the provinces, there were also large contingents of foreign warriors, both Cham and Chinese, easily distinguished by their hairdos and head coverings. It is impossible to know whether these were allies or mercenaries. The same might be said of the ethnic Thai troops and their officers depicted in a gal­lery of Angkor Wat—the first evidence for these people who were destined to play a huge part in the decline of the Khmer Empire.

The Bayon and Banteay Chmaar reliefs depict Jayavarman VII’s naval battles against his Cham enemies in great detail—clashes on the Tonle Sap between huge war vessels each containing 20 to 42 rowers, with cut-up bodies and drowned combatants providing food for enormous crocodiles. Khmer naval power must have extended from this great lake, down the Tonle Sap River to the “Four Rivers” region around modern Phnom Penh, and further down through the numerous Mekong waterways that drain the Delta. Whether it also extended along the coast of the South China Sea is unknown.