Where Did the Khmer Come From?

Khmer History · @khmer.history

Ask ten people where the Khmer come from and you may hear ten answers. Here are the main ideas scholars have put forward, and what most historians think today.

People in the land long ago

People have lived in what is now Cambodia for tens of thousands of years. At Laang Spean cave in Battambang, excavations since 2009 have found stone tools in layers dated to about 11,000 to 5,000 years ago, with older tools below them. That tells us people were here very early; it does not by itself tell us who the first Khmer were.

Four ideas

Came from India. Early European writers such as Hendrik Kern and Adhémard Leclère pointed to Indian-style writing, religion and court customs. Today historians see these as signs of close contact and cultural exchange from about the 1st century CE, not of a whole people moving from India.

Came from the north. Some writers suggested the Khmer came south from Tibet or China. Linguists do think the language family Khmer belongs to may have begun further north, perhaps in southern China or the Red River delta, some four thousand years ago.

A mix. Others, such as Henri Marchal, described the Khmer as a mixture of local peoples and newcomers. In a sense every people is a mix, and the Preah Thong legend itself tells of a newcomer marrying into the land.

Indigenous, then Indianised. Bernard-Philippe Groslier, Marcel Talabot and others argued that the Khmer have lived in the region since prehistory and later adopted Indian ideas. This is close to the mainstream view today, and it is also the conclusion of the Royal Academy of Cambodia book cited by Fresh News.

What most historians think today

Khmer belongs to the Austroasiatic, or Mon-Khmer, family of languages, which it shares with Mon, Vietnamese and many smaller languages of the region. The oldest dated inscription in Khmer, from Angkor Borei, is from 611 CE, and the people of Funan very likely already spoke an early form of Khmer. So most scholars see the Khmer as a people of this land, who took in ideas from India and China and made them their own.

Where the name comes from

Many explanations have been offered for the word 'Khmer'. The one with support in old inscriptions links 'Kambuja' to the sage Kambu Svayambhuva and the celestial Mera, named in a 10th-century inscription. Others, gathered on KhSearch from writers such as Chhim Krasem, Sok Se and Keng Vannsak, are traditional word stories rather than proven history.

A word of caution: you may read that 'the Khmer are 682,000 years old'. Traces of early humans in Southeast Asia do go back a very long way, but they come from long before any people we could call Khmer. Keeping the two apart makes our history stronger, not weaker.