Khmer Lands, Peoples and Languages

The Khmer-speaking world around Angkor extended from the Kulen hills across a low plain to Tonle Sap in present-day Cambodia. From the ninth through the fifteenth centuries, temples and royal centers stood among fields, village settlements, reservoirs and roads. Water moved people and food through this landscape, while inscriptions preserve a partial record of its languages and institutions. Evidence from before Angkor’s rise and from later pilgrimages shows that Khmer history began before the famous capital and continued after political power moved elsewhere.

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Seasonal water and the Angkor plain

Angkor’s landscape linked the northern uplands to Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s Great Lake. Rainfall rose sharply during the monsoon, and the lake’s expanding waters changed where people could live and farm. Zhou Daguan, a Chinese visitor who spent time at Angkor in 1296–1297, described afternoon rains from the fourth to the ninth lunar months. He wrote that the lake rose until large trees were partly submerged and that people living at the water’s edge moved to higher ground. During the dry months, the water receded and residents returned. Farmers, he said, judged the coming flood and the character of their land when choosing when and where to plant rice. This is Zhou’s account of the seasonal cycle he observed at Angkor.

From the ninth century, builders connected water from the hills to reservoirs, channels and embankments across the plain. These works could hold, divert or carry away water, and they were modified over time. The larger channels built from the twelfth century often directed excess water south toward Tonle Sap. Smaller shrines, ponds and raised settlement mounds were distributed through the same landscape. The system joined upland streams, inhabited land and the lake, but its parts and uses changed across Angkor’s history.

Settlements, routes and a dispersed population

Settlements spread across a broad landscape around Angkor. Alongside monumental temples, people lived along long earthen embankments and on raised mounds near small shrines and water tanks. These raised places kept dwellings above seasonal floodwater. Most houses were built from materials that decay, so archaeologists cannot count ancient residents by measuring surviving stone buildings alone. Aerial laser mapping, called lidar, has helped reveal earthworks and settlement traces beneath forest cover.

The landscape also connected people beyond the central plain. Rivers and constructed channels joined settlements to Tonle Sap and the Mekong system; raised roads led toward regional centers. Along the route from Angkor to Phimai on the Khorat Plateau in present-day northeastern Thailand, surveys found older settlement sites, evidence that parts of the road followed an established corridor. Some Old Khmer inscriptions occur as far as 900 kilometers from Angkor in areas probably outside its rulers’ control. These records show Khmer-speaking communities beyond the political boundary of the kingdom.

A 2021 study modeled approximately 700,000 to 900,000 people in the Greater Angkor Region at its thirteenth-century peak, within a study area of about 3,000 square kilometers. Its estimate combines settlement features mapped by lidar, archaeological excavation, radiocarbon dating, which estimates the age of once-living material, and computer models that place settlement growth in time. The researchers distinguished a dense ceremonial and administrative core from a much larger metropolitan area where fields and settlement were interspersed. Uncertainty about how many people lived along settlement embankments drives the range.

Khmer and Sanskrit in written records

Dated inscriptions in both Sanskrit and Khmer appear by the early seventh century, centuries before Angkor became the dominant capital. The oldest known dated Khmer-language inscription is from 611 CE at Angkor Borei in southern Cambodia. Across the Angkorian centuries, Khmer inscriptions often recorded donations, land, workers, officials and temple obligations. Sanskrit, a learned language used across South and Southeast Asia, often appeared in poetic praise of kings and in invocations of gods. Some inscriptions combined the languages, though these were tendencies rather than strict divisions: Sanskrit texts could include practical lists, and Khmer also served royal and religious purposes.

Zhou Daguan’s 1296–1297 account also records people from beyond Cambodia. He describes Chinese merchants in local markets and says Chinese mariners were settling in the region, while Chinese goods such as silk and ceramics circulated there. He also reports that people from neighboring Siam, in present-day Thailand, had recently begun raising silkworms in Cambodia, with mulberry and silkworms coming from Siam. Siamese weavers made dark silk garments, and Zhou says Khmer households hired Siamese women to mend torn clothes. His account captures a specific late-thirteenth-century network of residents, trade and textile work connecting Cambodia with China and Siam.

Life at Angkor after the capital shifted

A branch of the royal court moved its center southeast in the fifteenth century, but Angkor remained a place of worship and pilgrimage. From the mid-sixteenth through the eighteenth century, Khmer inscriptions at Angkor Wat recorded visits, Buddhist ceremonies and offerings; some also describe repairs to older temples. These later records show Khmer-speaking rulers, officials and pilgrims continuing to use and repair Angkor as a sacred landscape after the royal center moved.