The spokesman was also boasting that Cambodia's recorded history stretched back for two millennia. In fact, archaeological data has revealed that the area we now call "Cambodia" was inhabited by human beings at least 40, years ago. Cities developed along the coast in the centuries before and after the birth of Christ. Indian and Chinese pilgrims and traders passed through these cities, and for the first centuries of the Christian era sources for Cambodian history that survive are almost entirely written in Chinese.
We know about them from the remains of small religious monuments in brick, laterite and stone, from massive stone sculptures, and from inscriptions in Sanskrit and Cambodian, or Khmer. The earliest dated inscription comes from the 4th century CE.
In the late 8th century, a Khmer prince later crowned as Jayavarman II returned to Cambodia from "exile" in Java, and began to consolidate the kingdom. In , in a ceremony near the site we now call Angkor, north of Cambodia's Great Lake, he declared himself a universal monarch, and founded a dynasty that lasted until Angkor was abandoned in the 16th century.
In its heyday, Angkor was a powerful kingdom that dominated much of mainland Southeast Asia. Its capital, Yasodharapura, probably housed as many as a million people—most of them farmers—making it one of the most populous cities in the world. The city's temples, dedicated to the Buddha or to Hindu gods, are among the artistic wonders of the world. An image of the most famous of these, Angkor Wat, has appeared on every Cambodian flag there have been five of them since the country gained its independence from France in In the 13th century, Cambodians converted en masse to Theravada Buddhism, the variant practiced by the Khmer today.
State-sponsored Hinduism, and the temples inspired by that religion, lost their importance, but for many years the kingdom remained strong and prosperous, as the Chinese emissary Zhou da guan reported in Over the next years, the empire shrank, as tributary states in what is now Thailand declared their independence and invaded Cambodian territory. By or so, the capital had shifted southward to the region of present-day Phnom Penh, where it has remained ever since.
Over the next four centuries, Cambodia became a small Buddhist kingdom dependent on the goodwill of its neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam, In the midth century, conflict between these kingdoms spilled onto Cambodian soil, and Cambodia almost disappeared.
They probably migrated from the north, although nothing is known about their language or their way of life. By the beginning of the 1st century ad, Chinese traders began to report the existence of inland and coastal kingdoms in Cambodia.
These kingdoms already owed much to Indian culture, which provided alphabets, art forms, architectural styles, religions Hinduism and Buddhism , and a stratified class system. Local beliefs that stressed the importance of ancestral spirits coexisted with the Indian religions and remain powerful today. Cambodia's modem-day culture has its roots in the 1st to 6th centuries in a state referred to as Funan, known as the oldest Indianized state in Southeast Asia. It is from this period that evolved Cambodia's language, part of the Mon-Khmer family, which contains elements of Sanskrit, its ancient religion of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Historians have noted, for example, that Cambodians can be distinguished from their neighbors by their clothing - checkered scarves known as Kramas are worn instead of straw hats. The following years saw powerful Khmer kings dominate much of present day Southeast Asia, from the borders of Myanmar east to the South China Sea and north to Laos.
It was during this period that Khmer kings built the most extensive concentration of religious temples in the world - the Angkor temple complex. The most successful of Angkor's kings, Jayavarman II, Indravarman I, Suryavarman II and Jayavarman VII, also devised a masterpiece of ancient engineering: a sophisticated irrigation system that includes barays gigantic man-made lakes and canals that ensured as many as three rice crops a year.
Part of this system is still in use today. Early Chinese writers referred to a kingdom in Cambodia that they called Funan. Modern-day archaeological findings provide evidence of a commercial society centered on the Mekong Delta that flourished from the 1st century to the 6th century. Among these findings are excavations of a port city from the 1st century, located in the region of Oc-Eo in what is now southern Vietnam.
Served by a network of canals, the city was an important trade link between India and China. Ongoing excavations in southern Cambodia have revealed the existence of another important city near the present-day village of Angkor Borei.
A group of inland kingdoms, known collectively to the Chinese as Zhenla, flourished in the 6th and 7th centuries from southern Cambodia to southern Laos. The first stone inscriptions in the Khmer language and the first brick and stone Hindu temples in Cambodia date from the Zhenla period.
In the early 9th century a Khmer ethnic Cambodian prince returned to Cambodia from abroad. He probably arrived from nearby Java or Sumatra, where he may have been held hostage by island kings who had asserted control over portions of the Southeast Asian mainland.
In a series of ceremonies at different sites, the prince declared himself ruler of a new independent kingdom, which unified several local principalities. His kingdom eventually came to be centered near present-day Siemreab in northwestern Cambodia. The prince, known to his successors as Jayavarman II, inaugurated a cult honoring the Hindu god Shiva as a devaraja Sanskrit term meaning "god-king". The cult, which legitimized the king's rule by linking him with Shiva, persisted at the Cambodian court for more than two hundred years.
Between the early 9th century and the early 15th century, 26 monarchs ruled successively over the Khmer kingdom known as Angkor, the modern name for its capital city. King Jayavarman VII. Historians have dated more than a thousand temple sites and over a thousand stone inscriptions most of them on temple walls to this era. Jayavarman VII, a fervent Buddhist, also built hospitals and rest houses along the roads that crisscrossed the kingdom. Most of the monarchs, however, seem to have been more concerned with displaying and increasing their power than with the welfare of their subjects.
Ancient City of Angkor This map shows the layout of the ancient city of Angkor, capital of the Cambodian Khmer kingdom from the 9th century to the 15th century. The city's huge stone temples were both civic centers and religious symbols of the Hindu cosmos. Historians believe that Angkor's network of canals and barays reservoirs were used for irrigation. At its greatest extent, in the 12th century, the Khmer kingdom encompassed in addition to present-day Cambodia parts of present-day Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar formerly Burma , and the Malay Peninsula.
Thailand and Laos still contain Khmer ruins and inscriptions. The kings at Angkor received tribute from smaller kingdoms to the north, east, and west, and conducted trade with China. The capital city was the center of an impressive network of reservoirs and canals, which historians theorize supplied water for irrigation.
Many historians believe that the abundant harvests made possible by irrigation supported a large population whose labor could be drawn on to construct the kings' temples and to fight their wars. The massive temples, extensive roads and waterworks, and confident inscriptions give an illusion of stability that is undermined by the fact that many Khmer kings gained the throne by conquering their predecessors.
Inscriptions indicate that the kingdom frequently suffered from rebellions and foreign invasions. Historians have not been able to fully explain the decline of the Khmer kingdom in the 13th and 14th centuries. However, it was probably associated with the rise of powerful Thai kingdoms that had once paid tribute to Angkor, and to population losses following a series of wars with these kingdoms. Another factor may have been the introduction of Theravada Buddhism, which taught that anyone could achieve enlightenment through meritorious conduct and meditation.
These egalitarian ideas undermined the hierarchical structure of Cambodian society and the power of prominent Hindu families. After a Thai invasion in , what remained of the Cambodian elite shifted southeastward to the vicinity of Phnom Penh. This map of Southeast Asia in the midth century shows the major centers of power in the region prior to the arrival of Europeans.
During this period, these kingdoms were constantly at war. Dai Viet modern Vietnam expanded to the south, taking over the remaining territory of the Kingdom of Champa and the southern tip of the Kingdom of Lovek modern Cambodia. By that time, border skirmishes were occurring regularly between the Cambodians and the Vietnamese.
The fighting intensified in , and in December the Vietnamese sent more than 60, troops, along with air and artillery units, across the border. On January 7, , they captured Phnom Penh and forced Pol Pot to flee back into the jungle, where he resumed guerrilla operations.
Throughout the s, the Khmer Rouge received arms from China and political support from the United States, which opposed the decade-long Vietnamese occupation. In a Khmer Rouge splinter group captured Pol Pot and placed him under house arrest. He died in his sleep on April 15, , at age 72 due to heart failure. A United Nations-backed tribunal has convicted only a handful of Khmer Rouge leaders of crimes against humanity.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Khmer Rouge was a brutal regime that ruled Cambodia, under the leadership of Marxist dictator Pol Pot, from to Nikita Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, serving as premier from to Though he largely pursued a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West, the Cuban Missile Crisis began after he positioned nuclear weapons 90 miles from During the late s and early s, the prospect of communist subversion at home and abroad seemed frighteningly real to many people in the United States.
For many Americans, the most enduring Born in Germany in , Henry Kissinger escaped the Nazi regime to become a powerful and controversial U. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. After returning home in , Pol Pot joined clandestine groups in Cambodia. It was during this time that he began combining Stalinist and Maoist models with a returned focus on an agrarian society.
With support from rural Cambodians, North Vietnamese, and Chinese, Pol Pot was ultimately able to take control of the country in Although he would be overthrown four years later by an invading Vietnamese army, Pol Pot avoided capture.
He maintained some level of power for nearly two decades. However, Pol Pot would die in , before the trials took place. Although tried in absentia, he was never punished for his crimes and remained unrepentant until the end. The Cambodian Genocide represents a complicated time in history. In the early s, US diplomats raised concerns about the potential for mass atrocities in Cambodia. Comparison between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were made.
The level of support the Khmer Rouge received from fellow communist states North Vietnam and China also meant there were concerns over the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. In , the Khmer Rouge aimed outwards with the goal of creating a new Angkorian empire. At the time, China opposed the action by Vietnam. Because of the support from China, the Khmer Rouge regime was able to keep its seat at the UN until , three years after it lost power.
The occupation by Vietnam, the support from China, and the fact that the Khmer Rouge held power in many parts of rural Cambodia for more than a decade after the Vietnamese invasion, further complicates the international reaction to the genocide.
The Cambodian Genocide continues to play a role in Cambodia today.
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