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Sambor Prei Kuk

Also known as Ishanapura

Sambor Prei Kuk is an archaeological site in central Cambodia identified with Ishanapura, the capital of the Chenla king Ishanavarman I in the early seventh century, with more than a hundred brick temples, the oldest major group of Khmer temples to survive.

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Ishanapura

The Chinese histories of the Sui and Tang dynasties describe the capital of the king of Zhenla, or Chenla, as a city of twenty thousand households, with a great hall where the king held audience. Inscriptions found at Sambor Prei Kuk name Ishanavarman I, who ruled in the early seventh century, and the site has been identified since the early twentieth century with his capital, Ishanapura. The city lay on the Stung Sen river, a tributary of the great lake, the Tonle Sap, within an earthen enclosure of about two kilometres square, with the temple groups to the east.

The temples

More than a hundred temples survive, many in ruins and overgrown, grouped into three main complexes: the northern, southern and central groups, each with a main shrine within brick enclosure walls. The northern group, dedicated to Shiva as Gambhireshvara, and the southern, dedicated to Shiva as Gopatishvara, date mainly from Ishanavarman's reign; the central group is later. Many of the shrines are octagonal in plan, a form almost unique to this site in Khmer architecture.

The brick walls carry carved decoration, including the "flying palaces", reliefs of small palace buildings with figures inside, and lintels and colonnettes of stone carved with makaras and garlands. These lintels define the Sambor Prei Kuk style, the earliest phase in the scheme by which art historians date Khmer monuments. The sanctuaries held lingas and images of Hindu deities, including Harihara, the combined form of Vishnu and Shiva, which was especially popular in early Khmer religion. Several of the finest pieces of early Khmer sculpture come from the site, among them a standing goddess Durga of the seventh century, now in the National Museum in Phnom Penh, and they are among the earliest masterpieces of Khmer art in the round.

Significance

Sambor Prei Kuk shows that the brick temple architecture that culminated at Angkor two centuries later was already well developed in the seventh century. Its inscriptions, in Sanskrit and Old Khmer, are among the earliest records of Khmer political and religious institutions. The site was occupied into the Angkor period and later, but it lost its role as a capital.

Recent history

The site suffered during the war years of the late twentieth century, with bombing and looting, and unexploded ordnance had to be cleared. From the late 1990s Cambodian and Japanese teams surveyed and conserved the temples. Sambor Prei Kuk was inscribed by UNESCO in 2017 as the archaeological site of Ancient Ishanapura.

Further reading

  • Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
  • Higham, Charles. The Civilization of Angkor. University of California Press, 2001
  • Michell, George. The Hindu Temple: An Introduction to Its Meaning and Forms. University of Chicago Press, 1988

See also

  • Khmer Empire — The Khmer Empire was a Southeast Asian state centered on Angkor in present-day Cambodia that flourished from 802 to 1431 CE, building its political and religious order on Indian Hindu and, later, Buddhist models.
  • Angkor Wat — Angkor Wat is a 12th-century temple complex near Siem Reap, Cambodia, built by the Khmer king Suryavarman II as a state temple dedicated to Vishnu and now the largest religious monument in the world by area.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.