Jayavarman II is proclaimed universal monarch on Mount Mahendra

Jayavarman II left no inscriptions of his own; his story is told above all by the stele of Sdok Kak Thom, a history of a family of royal priests written in 1052/1053. ‘His Majesty came from Java to reign in the city of Indrapura’, it says; after residing at Hariharalaya and Amarendrapura he went to reign at Mahendraparvata. There the Brahmin Hiranyadama, invited from Janapada, performed a rite so that the country of the Kambujas would no longer depend on Java and there would be only one sovereign, a chakravartin; he established the cult of the kamraten jagat ta raja, called devaraja in Sanskrit, and taught its texts to the royal chaplain Shivakaivalya, whose family was to conduct it. The king later returned to Hariharalaya and died there. Later inscriptions call him ‘the king who established his residence on the summit of Mount Mahendra’, and many families traced their offices and lands back to his reign. In 2012 airborne laser scanning revealed on the plateau the plan of a city with temples, roads, dykes and ponds, identified with Mahendraparvata.

The date and meaning of the event are disputed. The year 802 (Shaka 724) appears in six inscriptions, the oldest from the early 10th century and the rest from the late 10th and the 11th; the Sdok Kak Thom stele gives no date for the rite, and the only text that joins the date to Mount Mahendra says that Jayavarman ruled the earth in 802 and established his capital there, not that he was consecrated in that year. Claude Jacques and Michael Vickery identified him with a Jayavarman known from inscriptions of 770 and 781 and pointed to an inscription showing him as king in 790; Pierre Dupont argued that the Kulen rite took place after 812 or even 822. What ‘Java’ meant is also debated: George Coedès saw in it the realm of the Shailendras, while others have proposed Champa, a state in the Malay Peninsula or Land Chenla, and Vickery came to regard the whole story of liberation from Java as an 11th-century legend. Late in life Coedès himself doubted that the devaraja cult went back to Jayavarman II.