Zakharov Anton

Few Remarks on Slavery in pre-Angkorian Cambodia

ЮГО-ВОСТОЧНАЯ АЗИЯ: АКТУАЛЬНЫЕ ПРОБЛЕМЫ РАЗВИТИЯ, 2016, №31, 210-218

 
Annotation: Pre-Angkorian inscriptions composed in Sanskrit and/or Old Khmer and dated from the seventh-eighth centuries CE often mention donations of various men and women to divinities or monasteries. These peoples call kñuṃ. Historians George Cœdès, Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Judith Jacob, and Dega Deopik considered them ‘slaves’. But recently Michael Vickery and Eric Bourdonneau have made serious objections against the identification of kñuṃ with ‘slaves’. They also have supposed that the kñuṃ were but a part of the personnel offered to divinities and/or monasteries because few humans among those personnel are identified by the term kñuṃ before their own names or before the indication of their sex usually placed before the personal names in Old Khmer. The paper tends to analyze the data of pre-Angkorian inscriptions on the forms of dependency in the pre-Angkorian Cambodia.

Keywords: CHENLA/ZHENLA, KñUṃ, CAMBODIA, DONATIONS, BESTOWALS, SLAVES, SLAVERY, TEMPLES, DIGNITARIES