Devaraja

"Devarāja" is a Sanskrit word which could have different meanings such as "god-king" or "king of the gods". In a Khmer context the term was used in the latter sense, but occurs only in the Sanskrit portion of the inscription K. 235 from Sdok Kak Thom / Sdok Kăk Thoṃ (in modern Thailand) dated 8 February 1053 CE, referring to the Khmer term kamrateṅ jagat ta rāja ("Lord of the Universe who is King") describing the protective deity of the Khmer Empire, a distinctly Khmer deity, which was mentioned before in the inscription K. 682 of Chok Gargyar (Kòḥ Ker) dated 921/22 CE.^[1]

Khmer Empire and Jayavarman II

In the Sdok Kăk Thoṃ inscription a member of a Brahman familiy claimed that his ancestors since the time of Jayavarman II (Khmer: ជ័យវរ្ម័នទី២), who established around 800 CE by marriage to the daughter of a local king in the Angkor region a small realm which became at the end of the 9th century the famous Khmer Empire, were responsible for the cult of the Devarāja (kamrateṅ jagat ta rāja). Historians formerly dated his reign as running from 802 CE to 850 CE, but these dates are of very late origin (11th century) and without any historical basis. Some scholars^[2] now have tried to identify Jayavarman II with Jayavarman Ibis who is known from his inscriptions from Práḥ Thãt Práḥ Srĕi south of Kompoṅ Čàṃ (K. 103, dated 20 April 770^[3] and from Lobŏ’k Srót in the vicinity of Kračèḥ close to the ancient town of Śambhupura (K. 134, dated 781 CE^[4]). The Sdok Kăk Thoṃ inscription incised c. 250 years after the events (of which their historicity is doubtful) recounts that on the top of the Kulen Hills, Jayavarman II instructed a Brahman priest named Hiraṇyadāman to conduct a religious ritual known as the cult of the devarāja (Khmer: ទេវរាជា) which placed him as a cakravartin, universal monarch, a title never heard of before in the Khmer soil.

References

1. ^ Claude Jacques, “The Kamrateṅ Jagat in ancient Cambodia”, Indus Valley to Mekong Delta. Explorations in Epigraphy; ed. by Noboru Karashima, Madras: New Era Publications, 1985, pp. 269-286
2. ^ see for example Michael Vickery, Society, Economics, and Politics in Pre-Angkor Cambodia: The 7th-8th Centuries, Tokyo: The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies for Unesco, The Toyo Bunko, 1998, p. 396: "Not only was Jayavarman II from the South; more than any other known king, he had particular­ly close links with Vyādhapura. This place is recorded in only one pre-Angkor inscription, K. 109/655 [exactly: 10th Feb­ruary 656], but in 16 Angkor-period texts, the last dated 1069 [K. 449 from Pàlhàl, dated Sunday, 3rd May 1069] … Two of them, K. 425/968 and K. 449/1069, are explicit records of Jayavarman II taking people from Vyādhapura to settle in Battambang”
3. ^ Inscriptions du Cambodge, Vol. V, Paris 1953, pp. 33-34
4. ^ Inscriptions du Cambodge, Vol. II, Hanoi 1942, pp. 92-95