Page:Origins of Sukhodaya dynasty - Coedes - 1921.pdf/1



The dynasty which reigned during a part of the XIIIth. and the first half of the XIVth. centuries at Sukhodaya and at Śrī Sajjanālaya, on the upper Mēnam Yom, is the first historical Siamese dynasty. It has a double claim to this title, both because its cradle was precisely in the country designated by foreigners as "Siam" (Khmer: Syāṃ; Chinese: Sien, etc.), and because it is this dynasty which, by freeing the Thai principalities from the Cambodian yoke and by gradually extending its conquests as far as the Malay Peninsula, paved the way for the formation of the Kingdom of Siam properly so called. Its role in the history of Indo-Chinese arts and institutions is not less important than its political role: inheriting as it did the succession of the Khmer Kingdom, which sank in part beneath the blows that it administered, it has transmitted to the Siam of Ayudhya a good number of Cambodian art-forms and institutions which still subsist in the Siam of to-day.

The study of the dynasty in question is thus of great interest for the history of Indo-China. The sources for such a study are as follows: the local epigraphy, some Pāli historical texts of the beginning of the XVIth. century, the cycle of legends preserved in the Siamese work entitled "Northern Annals," and finally the Chinese Dynastic Annals.

Professor L. Finot has characterised in very happy terms the main features of the old Thai epigraphy (Bulletin de l'Ecole Française