IN 1860 Henri Mouhot, a French botanist in Siam, stirred by natives' reports of empty
cities lost in the jungle, pushed onward into the great forests of the Mekong River, until,
one burning tropic dawn, he looked upon the incredible spectacle of the towers of Ang-
kor rising like some fantastic mirage of mountain peaks above the sea of jungle. There
had, to be sure, been discredited tales of vanished cities by Spanish missionaries as early
as the seventeenth century, ¹ but Mouhot's discovery was the first the modern Western
world knew of one of the great civilizations of Asia.

Even until quite recently, after more than eighty years of research had largely re-
solved the problems of the history of the builders of Cambodian civilization, it used to
be fondly believed - and the legend probably survives in 'science-fiction' - that the
colossal ruins in Indo-China were the work of a race whose origins are as mysterious as
its disappearance. In this chapter we shall be concerned with tracing the history of art in
Cambodia, culminating in the great monuments of Angkor.

According to Chinese legend, Funan, the most ancient kingdom in present day Indo-
China, was founded in the first century A.D., when a Brahmin adventurer, Kaundinya,
espoused a native princess; according to native variants of the story, this princess was a
Nāginī, one of those half-human, half-serpentine beings, who in India are the spirits of
the waters. ² This earliest kingdom comprised the territory of Cambodia, Cochin China,
and southern Siam. Presumably it marked a development from the earliest settlements
by peoples of Sino-Tibetan origin, who even earlier had occupied the land around the
mouths of the Mekong and Menam rivers. From this earliest period of Cambodian his-
tory there is abundant evidence, both in the form of finds, and of reports of Chinese
visitors, to confirm the close relations between the kingdom of Funan, India, and China. ³
There are indications, too, that during these same centuries Indian colonists established
themselves in many parts of Cambodia and the Malay Peninsula; indeed, the finds of
sculpture in the style of the Later Āndhras in Java and even the Celebes indicate the ex-
tent of the spread of Indian Buddhism and its art over all south-eastern Asia. The kings
of the earliest dynasty had already adopted the Pallava patronymic -varman (protector),
a very sure indication of the origins of their culture. All the monuments of this pre-
Khmer civilization of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries point to the Indian origin of
this earliest style. Pre-Khmer or Indo-Khmer is the name given to this period from
the first to the seventh century.

-211-