Jayavarman VII Dedicates Ta Prohm to His Mother
An inscription lists over 12,600 people supporting a single Buddhist monastery-temple
Quick facts
- Founding king
- Jayavarman VII
- Dedication
- To the king's mother
- Original name
- Rajavihara
- Personnel per inscription
- 12,644, including 615 dancers
What happened
In 1186, Jayavarman VII dedicated a Mahayana Buddhist monastery and center of learning called Rajavihara, monastery of the king, known today as Ta Prohm, to his mother, honored in the temple's central image as Prajnaparamita, the bodhisattva embodying transcendent wisdom. The temple's own foundation stele, K.273, one of the largest surviving inscriptions from Angkor at 127 verses across four carved faces, records the scale of its endowment directly: 3,140 villages granted the temple by the king, self-donors, and devotees, and 12,644 personnel assigned to it, including 615 dancers, according to the scholarly translation hosted by Study Ancients. Ta Prohm is one of the few Angkorian temples that conservators deliberately left partly overgrown by jungle when restoration work began in the early 20th century, preserved as what French archaeologists called a concession to the picturesque.
Why it matters
The Ta Prohm inscription is direct documentary proof of just how large an administrative and economic footprint a single royal temple could carry, over twelve thousand people organized around one building's upkeep, which is a concrete measure of the labor and resources Jayavarman VII's whole building program required across the empire.
How we know
The personnel and village figures come directly from the Ta Prohm stele inscription itself, a first-hand administrative record rather than a later account, translated verse by verse from the original Sanskrit.
Sources
- Study Ancients (Sanskrit text, Khmer script, and translation). Ta Prohm Inscription K.273 · Primary source (author-declared)studyancients.com · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
- World History Encyclopedia. Angkor · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry.
- World History Encyclopedia. Jayavarman VII · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry.
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