God-King of the Mountain: Jayavarman II

The God-King of the Mountain: Jayavarman IIIn 802 AD, on a sacred plateau rising from the Cambodian plain, a king performed a ceremony that changed the history of Southeast Asia forever. Jayavarman II, warrior, diplomat, and visionary, gathered his priests, invoked the gods of the Shaiva Tantric tradition, and declared himself the sole sovereign of the Khmer land, independent of Javanese domination and ordained by the cosmos itself. From that single ritual act, one of the most magnificent civilizations the ancient world produced was born.The God-King of the Mountain traces the full arc of Jayavarman II's extraordinary life and achievement, from his mysterious formation at a Javanese court, through decades of brilliant military and diplomatic consolidation across the Mekong corridor, to the founding ceremony that inaugurated the devaraja cult and set the ideological template for six centuries of Angkorian kingship. Drawing on the latest archaeological discoveries, including the revolutionary LiDAR surveys that revealed the lost city of Mahendraparvata beneath the Cambodian forest, and engaging critically with the inscriptional record that preserves the founding narrative, this book offers the most complete account yet written of the man behind Angkor, the god in the stone, the king who made a civilization.