Inscriptions of Koh Ker 1. [antikvár]

forewordKoh Ker was the capital of the Khmer kingdom for a period of scarcely two decades in the 10th century under Jayavarman IV, and still it was the setting for royal vision that materialized m large scaie uvn anu xambitious construction activity transformed a landscape of more than 84km* from"koki tree thicket" woodland into an impressive site of more than one hundredtemples and other structures. Mysterious as it is, Koh Ker today abounds m monu-ments and is a rich source of data on an intriguing phase of Khmer history, muchof which has yet to be discovered and studied.The Koh Ker Project of the Hungarian Indochina Corporation was started threeyears ago with the intention of carrying out an excavation programme, as wellas a study of the natural and social environment of the Koh Ker region. The man-agement of the project has been recently taken over by the Hungarian SoutheastAsian Research Institute founded in 2011 by Dr István Zelnik, art collector andowner of the Zelnik István Southeast Asian Gold Museum in Budapest. Alongsidethe archaeological programme pursued in close cooperation with APSARA (theAuthority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of SiemReap), an important programme to decipher and interpret the Sanskrit and OldKhmer inscriptions of Koh Ker was also launched with the participation of theeminent scholar Professor Claude Jacques and the talented young Khmer epigra-phist Kunthea Chhom. The results of the dedicated work of the latter is publishedin the present volume.While the temples of Koh Ker have been subject to archaeological study sincethe last quarter of the 19th century, the many inscriptions born by the templeshave been much less studied. After the pioneering work of G. Coedés between1937 and 1966, a few more inscriptions were edited by S. Pou in 2001.In the course of our programme, the scientific documentation of seventy-threeold Khmer and Sanskrit inscriptions in nine temples has been carried out. In thepresent part of our project sixty-one inscriptions have come under scrutiny, ofwhich the deciphering, translation and interpretation of fifty-seven have beencompleted. The remaining four epigraphs are so damaged as to be completely il-legible. The inscriptions are from six temples, nine from Prasat Banteay Pir Chan,seven from Prasat Chen, one from Prasat Damrei, thirty-eight from Prasat Kracap,'five from Prasat Thom and one from Prasat Ben Ven.Elusive as they are at many points, not least due to their poor state of preserva-tion, these inscriptions are socially and linguistically informative just the same.The lists of names contained in the inscriptions, in the hands of a committed