Armed Rural Folkthe mover of the wheel).^10 Court patronage and writing for the court
meant that written records, including royal edicts and chronicles,
were imprinted with the same view that warfare and the religion were
inseparable. The view that the ruler maintained the universal order and
the wellbeing of the kingdom and of the religion was played out in the
symbolic laying-out of the palaces in mainland kingdoms and the naming
of queens according to the cardinal points;^11 it was played out in court
rituals and in the streets in royal processions, and this role was reaffirmed
in the court-sponsored historical narratives of battles found in the royal
chronicles. Warfare was waged mainly in ordered ways. Very neatly or-
ganized contingents who departed the royal city with great attention to
pomp and ritual and commanders from royal and princely households
engaged in brave combat against each other while the common warriors
fought according to Indic tactology and formations found in the Sanskrit
texts. Wars were held to be actions taken to punish the wicked, to bring
disordered regions and kingdoms under the king’s rule, and to restore
harmony to the world. Order meant universal harmony that was a good
thing for the kingdom. Conversely, disorder indicated disharmony and
was something to be avoided.
Artistic illustrations have been a special obstacle to understanding
war and conflict in the region because, for the classical period, Southeast
Asia’s cultural, religious, and political formative period, artistic repre-
sentations in the form of bas-reliefs are often our only source. They
have thus been used extensively in the study of warfare in the region for
the classical and early modern periods. In these cases, however admit-
tedly pioneering and important such work may have been, they have
nevertheless lent themselves to state depictions of warfare.^12 Despite the
formal purposes for which artistic or literary works depicting warfare
- Sunait Chutintaranond, “Cakravartin: The Ideology of Traditional Warfare in Siam
and Burma, 1548–1605”, (Ph.D. dissertation: Cornell University, 1990). For the
broader implications of the concept of cakravartin for rulership in Southeast Asia,
see Stanley J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer, A Study of Buddhism
and Polity in Thailand Against a Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1976). - For early treatment of this phenomenon, see Robert Heine-Geldern, Conceptions
of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press Southeast
Asia Program, 1956). - Michel Jacq-Hergoualc’h, The Armies of Angkor: Military Structure and Weaponry
of the Khmers (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2007); Quaritch Wales, Ancient South-East