Dvaravati

This article is about a historical civilization in central and northeastern Thailand. For the Dvaravati in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, see Dvārakā.

Dvaravati
6th–11th century
[800] SIND UYGHUR KHAGANATE GURJARA- PRATIHARAS RASHTRA- KUTAS PALA EMPIRE CHAM- PA NAN- ZHAO TURK SHAHIS TANG DYNASTY SILLA Khitans Jurchens Tungus KARLUK YABGHU Tatars CHENLA DVARA- VATI SRIVIJAYA Kyrgyzs Paleo-Siberians Samoyeds Kimeks Tanguts Shatuos ABBASID CALIPHATE KHAZAR KHAGANATE BYZANTINE EMPIRE OGHUZ YABGUS TIBETAN EMPIRE Dvaravati civilization and contemporary Asian polities, 800 CE
Spread of Dvaravati culture and Mon Dvaravati sites Mon wheel of the law (Dharmacakra), art of Dvaravati period, c. 8th century CE Buddha, art of Dvaravati period, c. 8th–9th century CE Bronze double denarius of the Gallic Roman emperor Victorinus (269–271 AD) found at U Thong, Thailand Khao Khlang Nai was a Buddhist sanctuary. The central stupa, rectangular in shape and oriented toward the east, is characteristic of dvaravati architectural style, dated back around 6th–7th century CE. Khao Khlang Nok, was an ancient Dvaravati-style stupa in Si Thep, dated back around 8th–9th century CE, at present, it is large laterite base.
Capital	Si Thep Ayojjhapura Nakhon Pathom Mueang Uthong
Common languages	Old Mon
Religion	Buddhism Hinduism
Historical era	Post-classical era
• Established	6th century
• Disestablished	11th century
Preceded by Succeeded by Mon city-states Qiān Tanling Tun Sun Tou Yuan Kamalanka Chin Lin Duō Miè Xiān Suvarnapura Hariphunchai Lopburi Suphanburi Chaliang Phetchaburi

Dvaravati refers to a network of early historic polities in present-day central Thailand, conventionally dated from about the 6th to the 11th century; archaeological evidence, however, places the beginnings of its culture several centuries earlier, in a phase usually called Proto-Dvaravati. It is tentatively regarded as a successor to the polity Chinese sources call Lang-chia or Lang-ya-hsiu. Chinese Buddhist accounts of the mid-7th century place a Buddhist kingdom called To-lo-po-ti west of Isanapura in Cambodia, east of Sri Ksetra in Burma, and north of Pan Pan. To the north it bordered Jiā Luó Shě Fú (迦逻舍佛), identified with Canasapura in the upper Mun-Chi basin and with Si Thep in the Pa Sak basin. Dvaravati is recorded to have sent embassies to the Chinese court in 583, around 605–616, in 638, 640, 643, 647, and 649. Baker and Pasuk count three under the name To-lo-po-ti, in 638, 640 and 649.

The term also denotes a wider cultural and artistic sphere associated with a loose conglomeration of Mon principalities rather than a centralized state. Mon communities, possibly including maritime traders, are thought to have contributed to the emergence and spread of Dvaravati culture in the Chao Phraya valley by the early centuries CE, following a transitional Proto-Dvaravati phase in the 2nd to 5th centuries associated with principalities such as Chin Lin and Tun Sun in the western plains alongside Tou Yuan to the east.

Dvaravati's early political centre is disputed. Proposed centers include Ayojjhapura (Si Thep), Sambuka (Nakhon Pathom), and Avadhyapura (Si Mahosot). Prominence appears to have passed by the mid-7th century to Lavo's Lavapura, after Tou Yuan was absorbed in 647. Some scholars date the shift later, to the 10th or 11th centuries and the decline of Si Thep; others treat Lavapura as a separate polity, later the Lavo Kingdom, lying within the Dvaravati sphere. 

Its decline probably had several overlapping causes rather than one: the expansion of Angkor from the lower Mekong between the 11th and 13th centuries, northward campaigns by Tambralinga under King Sujita in the mid-10th century, reported to have taken Lavo, Angkorian instability and warfare in the early 11th century reaching the Menam valley, and Pagan incursions into central Thailand in the 11th and 12th. Jean Boisselier held that Dvaravati lost the eastern centres such as Lavo by the 10th or 11th century while the Mon principalities of the western plains lasted into the early 12th, coming briefly under Angkorian influence under Jayavarman VII (r. 1181–1218). Thereafter, the region entered the Xiān period, marked by the emergence of Suphannabhum, Phrip Phri, and Ayodhya, the latter reasserting control over Lavo by the 14th century.

History

Dvaravati-style Chedi at Wat Phra Rub, Suphan Buri province, now completely destroyed.

Dvaravati period stone buddha, now in Phra Pathom Chedi National Museum

Dvaravati culture is marked by moated urban settlements, of which U Thong in present-day Suphan Buri Province is generally taken to be the earliest; other major sites are Nakhon Pathom, Pong Tuek, Si Thep, Khu Bua and Si Mahosot. The name comes from coins inscribed in Sanskrit śrī dvāravatī, "that which has gates". The Wat Phra Ngam Inscription (N.Th. 21), found in 2019 in Nakhon Pathom province and dated to the 6th century, names three cities, Śrīyānaṁdimiriṅga or Śrīyānaṁdimiriṅgapratipura, Hastināpurī and Dvāravatī, which suggests that Nakhon Pathom was Dvāravatī's central place. Dvāravatī is Krishna's city in Indian tradition, and Sukhothai inscriptions 2 and 11 call a city that is probably Nakhon Pathom nakhon phra krit, the city of Lord Krishna. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit take this as some support for the identification. The coins are small silver medallions. Four published groups come from Nakhon Pathom, from Noen Hin in the same province, from the Brahmanical sanctuary of Khok Chang Din at U Thong and from Sing Buri province, with at least twenty-two further examples recorded. All read śrī-dvāravatī-īśvara-puṇya, "merit of the glorious Lord of Dvāravatī"; Peter Skilling rejects the common segmentation śrīdvāravatī śvarapuṇya, there being no word śvara. Since they come consistently from sanctuary foundations, Cœdès and later Skilling took them for ritual deposits rather than currency, so that their distribution maps the reach of the ruler's merit and not a monetary zone. The toponym is otherwise rare in Khmer epigraphy, occurring as a place name in an inscription of 952 and as a personal name in one of 1002.

The conventional chronology rests on Chinese texts and art-historical comparison. Excavations at Chan Sen and the Tha Muang mound at U Thong have unsettled it: newly dated Dvaravati material from U Thong may take the tradition's beginnings back to about 200 CE. Archaeological, art-historical and epigraphic evidence nonetheless places the main period in the seventh to ninth centuries. Dvaravati culture also spread into Isan and lowland Laos from the sixth century, with major sites at Mueang Fa Daet in Kalasin Province and Sema in Nakhon Ratchasima Province. Ian Glover named the interval between the two bodies of evidence the "Pre-Dvāravatī Gap". Late prehistoric assemblages are rich in iron tools and finely worked hard-stone beads. Dvaravati collections hold little iron and much poorer bead work, but add brick religious architecture and moated enclosures. Glover left open whether this is a break in occupation or simply sites not yet found. AMS radiocarbon dates on brick and plaster at U Thong have since taken occupation back to the fifth or perhaps the fourth century, on which Andrew Barram and Glover argued that the conventional range of about 600–1000 CE should move back some two centuries, the added phase being called Early or Proto-Dvaravati.

The earliest reference to Dvaravati on stone is the Wat Chanthuek Inscription (N.M. 4; K.1009) from Pak Chong, Nakhon Ratchasima Province, in Sanskrit in the Pallava script, a south Indian type now more often called Late Southern Brahmi, recording that a queen who was a daughter of the Lord of Dvaravati set up a stone image of the Tathāgata. Kannika Wimonkasem and Chirapat Prapandvidya date the script to about 550–650, Claude Jacques to the sixth century. What it shows about Dvaravati's extent is disputed. John Guy takes it to carry the zone well into northeastern Thailand; Skilling argues that calling the donor the ruler's daughter places the site outside Dvaravati and marks a marriage alliance with a neighbouring realm.

Proto-Dvaravati: 1st – 5th centuries

Further information: Chin Lin, Tun Sun, and Kamalanka

The phase predates the 6th century and is usually placed in the 1st to 5th centuries, though some scholars restrict it to the 4th and 5th. Its sites lie mainly in the western Menam valleys: the unmoated settlement of Pong Tuek (พงตึก), proposed as one of the five capitals of Tun Sun; the moated city of Mueang Uthong, sometimes identified as the centre of Chin Lin; and Ban Don Ta Phet. Pong Tuek's place in this phase rests on Cœdès's chronology of 1928. He dated a small bronze Buddha found there to about the 2nd century on an Amarāvatī attribution, and a metal lamp to the 1st or 2nd, which made the settlement the earliest known Dvaravati site. Both have since been redated, the lamp to an early Byzantine origin of about the 5th or 6th century and the Buddha to the 8th, along with four further bronze Buddhas Cœdès had placed in the 6th.

The region was occupied from at least c. 1000 BCE. Between about 900 and 200 BCE the material record suggests growing participation in maritime exchange, possibly reaching present-day Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam, and settlement continued and expanded through the Bronze and Iron Ages; by the 1st or 2nd century CE contacts extended to South Asia, China and lands further west. Finds at several sites have been read as evidence of exchange networks tied to Funan, though the political relationship remains debated. The cemetery of Ban Don Ta Phet in Kanchanaburi province, 25 km south of U Thong and radiocarbon-dated to the late centuries BCE, shows their reach. Excavated by the Fine Arts Department from 1975 and by a Thai–British team under Glover between 1980 and 1985, it yielded over a thousand iron tools and weapons, more than any other reported prehistoric site in Thailand, with glass and etched carnelian beads, high-tin bronze bowls, a jade nephrite ear pendant of Sa Huỳnh type thought to come from Taiwan, a Dong Son bronze situla, and figurines of a haṃsa and a peacock pointing to contact with Indian religious traditions.

In the eastern plain, the Sup Champa site (เมืองโบราณซับจำปา) in Lopburi Province points to a complex society by about 500 BCE, but it is too little excavated for its regional role to be established. By the 5th or 6th century CE Mueang Uthong still held its central place, while Nakhon Pathom was growing alongside it. From approximately the 6th to the 10th centuries CE, Nakhon Pathom is widely regarded as a supra-regional center of the Dvaravati cultural sphere, alongside other major centers such as Si Thep in the eastern plain.

Origin traditions and migration narratives

Further information: Yonok Kingdom

The Tai Yuan Legend of Singhanavati calls the lower Menam Basin before the Dvaravati period Lava-rāṣṭra (ลวรัฐ; lit. 'land of the Lawa people'), meeting Yonok around the mouth of the Ping River. This fits Gordon Luce’s view that the Lawa once held much of central Thailand as far south as Lopburi, an argument resting on a supposed link between Lavapuri of the seventh-century Lavo Kingdom and the ethnonym Lawa.

The same text records continuing dealings between Tai Yuan and Lawa or Lua groups from the founding of Yonok, the first ruler Singhanavati subduing several existing settlements, some of them implicitly Lawa. Marriage followed: the third Yonok king, Achutraraj (พญาอชุตราช), took a Lawa princess of Doi Tung as chief queen, and their son succeeded him. The Lawa town of Wiang Phang Kham served the Singhanavati kings as their base in the campaign to recover Yonok from Umongkasela in the late 4th century.

Late in the Yonok period Chaiyasiri is said to have faced invasion by the Mon kingdom of Thaton, and in 444 CE to have led some 100,000 households south into the upper Chao Phraya basin, founding a settlement at present-day Kamphaeng Phet. No relationship has been shown between this narrative and the earliest epigraphic occurrence of the ethnonym syam, in the Funan inscription K.557 of 611 CE. From a separate tradition, the Tang Huiyao and the Cefu Yuangui record an independent polity, Duō Miè, small in extent but populous, lying against the western border of Dvaravati's Tou Yuan, which was centred either at Lopburi or at Si Mahosot. The migration story also shaped later reconstructions of Tai-speaking movement, which posit two routes, one from the northwest by way of the later Möng Mao and one from the northeast by way of Muang Then.

Western accounts of the Ayutthaya period record that King Phrom of the Singhanavati dynasty, father of Chaiyasiri, was held to be Ayutthaya's first monarch. Jeremias van Vliet, Guy Tachard and Simon de La Loubère report the belief as widespread and reinforced by court tradition under Maha Chakkraphat, Prasat Thong and Narai, which traced the royal line to Phrom. It has also shaped readings of the Burmese chronicle Hmannan Yazawin, which records that in 1056 the Gywans of Ayoja, or Arawsa, southeast of Thaton, attacked the Mon centre there. George Cœdès identified Ayoja with Ayodhya or Siam; Francis H. Giles took the Gywans for descendants of the Tai Yuan.

Early Dvaravati: 6th – 9th centuries

Inscribed sculpture base from Si Thep, 8th century CE, featuring Pallava script in Pali language.

Pre-Dvaravati communities grew denser and larger, developing without a break until the major religious monuments of the early and middle Dvaravati period, built between roughly the first half of the 7th century and the first half of the 9th. The phase is often described as one of competition between two supra-regional centres, Nakhon Pathom in the western valley and Si Thep in the eastern plain, and after reported Chenla incursions in the 7th century several Dvaravati polities are thought to have been drawn into wider conflicts.

A 7th-century marriage between a Tai Yuan princess and the Mon prince of Lavo has been proposed, said to have produced King Sai Thong Som. The Laotian Legend of Khun Borom has Khun Borom, whom David K. Wyatt tentatively placed in the 7th century, send his nine sons to found domains of their own. One, Khoun Kôm (ขุนกม or ลกกม), founded Indaprasthanagara, which the Ayutthaya Testimonies place east of Sankhaburi in the Phraek Si Racha region; another, Ngua In (งัวอิน), founded Ayutthaya.

Both attributions are hard to reconcile with the Legend of Singhanavati, in which Indaprasthanagara already exists under Phrom of Yonok (r. 379–438): Phrom drives the forces of a vassal of Umongasela south towards present-day Kamphaeng Phet, and they flee to Indaprasthanagara in the Chao Phraya basin, an area the same text counts as part of Lava-rāṣṭra. The site of modern Ayutthaya before the 9th or 10th century, moreover, is described as low-lying swamp flooded each monsoon to about four metres above the dry-season level, and so unfit for settlement.

Rivalry among Dvaravati polities

Rivalry between regional centres such as Nakhon Pathom and Si Thep has been proposed, and later local traditions are commonly read as reflecting it, though interpretations differ.

Support for competition among the largest centres has been drawn from the moats themselves. Eight of the moated settlements of the central plain were enlarged, and five of these are either a regional centre or that centre's nearest neighbour. Before Nakhon Pathom added the second moat that took it to 602 ha it enclosed about 300 ha, close to Suphanburi and to the 315 ha Phraek Si Racha reached after its own enlargement from 81 ha. Mudar suggested that if the three stood at that size at the same time they may have been the capitals of competing polities, and that Nakhon Pathom's doubling marks the outcome; the expansions have not been dated against one another, which the argument requires.

The earliest narratives of conflict survive in versions of the Legend of Nakhon Chai Si and the Legend of Phra Praton Chedi. In these, Siddhijaya came from Manohana (a name identified with Ayojjhapura in the Pali Ratanabimbavaṃsa and Jinakalamali, and in turn with Si Thep) to the Nakhon Pathom region and took power there about 590 CE, defeating a ruler already in place, Kakabhadra. His rule may have run into the early 7th century: a Dvaravati mission to the Chinese court in 616 is entered under Tou-he (投和國) with the ruler named Pu-xie-qi-yao (脯邪乞遙), compared phonetically with Siddhijaya. Tradition, against this, has Kakabhadra holding parts of the region until 641, when his elder son Kalavarnadisharaja succeeded him, which has prompted the suggestion that the two names denote one man.

Detail of Wat Chamadevi (Wat Ku Kut), a Dvaravati-style brick chedi traditionally attributed to Queen Camadevi, dating to the 7th century, located in modern Lamphun.

A Dvaravati-style square 'stepped pyramid' chedi (Haripuñjaya), Wat Chamadevi, Lamphun.

Later tradition has Brahmins from Nakhon Pathom ordered about 629 CE to found a new city in what is now Lopburi, south of Si Thep, completed in 648 with Kalavarnadisharaja, son of Kakabhadra, as its first ruler, which these sources treat as the founding of the Lavo Kingdom. The Northern Chronicle makes his reign one of expansion reaching Chiang Saen in northern Thailand, where he is said to have held influence and formed dynastic ties with Tai Yuan rulers. The traditions say nothing of his dealings with Si Thep, ruled in the 6th and 7th centuries by the line attested in the Ban Wang Pai inscription (K.978) and later linked in the Jinakalamali to Rajadhiraj, a king of Ayojjhapura. The foundation story cannot be reconciled with the Cāmadevivaṃsa, in which Lavo in 647, a year before Kalavarnadisharaja's supposed accession, was already ruled by Navaratna (นพรัตน์), a king without an heir who adopted Camadevi and married her to Ramaraj, a prince of Ramburi whom some Thai scholars identify with Kalavarnadisharaja. Xuanzang likewise knew Lavo as Luó-wō-guó (罗涡国) by 629, and some sources put its foundation as early as 538.

Authority in the Menam basin seems to have been reordered after the last tribute mission credited to Dvaravati, the Tou-he kingdom (投和國) of Chinese records, in the Zhenguan period (貞觀, 627–649). Reading the Chinese sources, Tatsuo Hoshino puts the shift as early as about 665, when Pú jiā yuè mó, associated with Si Thep, is said to have brought both the Si Thep and Nakhon Pathom regions under one authority. It did not hold. Within the same century the Jinakalamali has Anuruddha, ruler of Arimaddanapura, often taken to be Nakhon Pathom, campaign against Ayojjhapura or Si Thep and carry off its ruler Manohanaraj, and the Northern Chronicle has him press on towards Indaprasthanagara in the Phraek Si Racha region. The tribute sequence had begun in 638 with an embassy arriving without Linyi, through which most South Seas missions then passed; the Cefu Yuangui notes at this first appearance that the state belonged to the Kunlun category. Missions followed in 640, 643 and 649, and in 643 and 647 embassies also came from Tuoheng, which the Jiu Tang shu calls a dependency of Dvaravati. In 649 the ruler sent ivory and fire-beads and asked for fine horses, Tuoheng having asked for horses and a bronze bell two years before. Lin Ying and Huang Jiaxin note that such requests were unusual where return gifts were normally silk, the only recorded grant of horses to a South Seas polity under the Tang being two sent to the king of Linyi in 713, and read Dvaravati's willingness to ask as a mark of the standing of a polity by which Chinese sources routinely located others.

Late in the 7th century, by the Legend of the Arhat (ตำนานนิทานพระอรหันต์), Balidhiraja, eldest son of Kalavarnadisharaja of Lavo and ruler of Sukhothai, marched south into the western valley, deposed its ruler and installed his youngest son Sai Thong Som, said to be of mixed Mon and Tai descent, while his elder son Balipatijaya took Lavo about 700 CE. A ruler called Padumasuriyavamsa then appears at Indaprasthanagara in the central Menam valley by 757. Later traditions give him Lavo and Sukhothai and a reach east across the Korat Plateau as far as Mueang Talung (เมืองตลุง or ตะลุมดอ) in present-day Prakhon Chai district, and several later Siamese monarchs claimed descent from him. The Legend of Mueang Phaya Re (ตำนานเมืองพญาเร่) gives the city's revival differently, to King Sudarśana (สุทัศน์), who rebuilt it as his capital in the same year. An 8th-century terracotta Buddha from Mueang Uthong carries the name of a King Maratha (มะระตา) and nothing further, so how he or his polity stood to the other centres cannot be determined.

In the early 9th century the Ratanabimbavaṃsa has Adītaraj of Ayojjhapura, that is Si Thep, besiege Indaprasthanagara after the death of its great ruler. The Si Thep line remained a regional power, as Bhagadatta shows, his reign dated from 859 CE by the Śrī Canāśa Inscription (K.949), and is said to have lasted until 949, when incursions from Angkor ended it. A possible ethnographic trace survives among the Nyah Kur people of Thep Sathit District, next to Si Thep in southern Phetchabun Province. They speak an archaic Mon-related language carrying Khmer loanwords, and their oral traditions tell of ancestors driven into the highlands after Khmer seized their settlement. Their spread across the borders of Phetchabun, Lopburi, Chaiyaphum and Nakhon Ratchasima has been linked to the expansion of Angkorian influence in the 10th and 11th centuries, and Khmer ceramics and Chinese Song dynasty celadon from the highland zone attest activity there between the 10th and 12th.

After Adītaraj's campaign, the Northern Chronicle and the Ratanabimbavamsa have Bhūpati (ภูบดี) of Vajraprākārapura (วชิรปาการปุระ, modern Kamphaeng Phet), on good terms with both Ayojjhapura and Ngoenyang Chiang Rai, send a son whose regnal name is not recorded to rule Lavo Lavapura, which had been under Indaprasthanagara since Padumasuriyavamsa's reign. The Ayutthaya Testimonies make Vajraprākārapura itself a foundation of one of Padumasuriyavamsa's descendants. A few decades later the Jinakalamali and Cāmadevivaṃsa bring in Uchitthaka, a cakravartin who lost Lavapura to Sujita of Tambralinga in 927 CE in a campaign bound up with Haripuñjaya, then marched north, took Haripuñjaya and ruled there until 930. Local ruling lines in the upper, central and western regions appear to have lasted into the late 10th and 11th centuries before pressure and invasion from Pagan, Tambralinga, Angkor, Chola and Ngoenyang Chiang Saen.

Khorat Plateau and Middle Mekong region

Prataduyaku, the principal stupa of Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang, exemplifies Dvaravati architecture, with later Ayutthaya and Rattanakosin modifications. The original structure dates to approximately the 7th–11th centuries CE.

The Khorat Plateau and the middle Mekong, east of the core Dvāravatī centres, appear not to have belonged to the Dvāravatī political network but to have developed as a loose landscape of small fortified and moated settlements. Working from the site inventories of Thiva Supajanya and Srisakra Vallibhotama, Charles F. Keyes argued that local traditions, above all the legend of Phadaeng Nang Ai and the Tamnan Fa Daet Song Yang (ตำนานฟ้าแดดสงยาง), preserve the names of early settlements there. One of these is Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang, the first site in northeastern Thailand identified as "Dvāravatī" by H. G. Quaritch Wales, and traditionally attributed to the foundation of Chao Fa Ra-ngum in 621 CE. Keyes warned against applying "Dvāravatī", "Mon" or even "Buddhist" uncritically to the plateau. The traditions show instead a fragmented landscape of largely autonomous muang, some holding subordinate settlements and others independent, and Buddhist practice alongside fertility cults and local spirit beliefs coloured by Hindu deities. The region's sema stones, Buddhist boundary markers, show the same mixture. Narrative carvings from Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang and Ban Nong Chat, generally dated to the 7th to 11th centuries and counted as Dvāravatī work, depict jātaka scenes and the life of the Buddha while marking the consecrated ground needed for ordination and other formal rites. An earlier theory took this tradition to have been carried to the Kalyāṇī sīmā at Thaton in lower Myanmar by Mon fleeing Angkorian expansion in northeast Thailand; more recent comparison finds substantial differences of form, composition and style between the two corpora, and suggests that the lower Myanmar tradition developed independently.

Epigraphic and Chinese evidence agrees with Keyes in showing the plateau divided among many small polities between the 6th and 9th centuries, several inscriptions naming local rulers or nobles as religious donors. The Sanskrit Phimai Inscription No. 1 (K.1000) of the 7th or 8th century names a Buddhist ruler, Sauryavarman, in the Phimai region; the Hĭn K‘ôn inscriptions (K.388 and K.389) a Buddhist noble, Nrpendradhiphativarman, with his similarly named father; the Don Mueang Toei inscription King Pravarasena of Śaṅkhapura; the Wat Ban Waan inscription (ศก. 13) King Srimanya; and the Wat Pa Nong Peng inscription King Śrīmānarājā, whose reign it describes as a time of political turmoil. Together they attest multiple local polities before Angkorian authority arose to the south.

During roughly the same period, corresponding to the reign of Mahendravarman of Chenla (r. 600–615), parts of the Khorat Plateau may have come under temporary Chenla influence. Victory inscriptions of Mahendravarman are spread across the Mun–Chi basin from Dong Mueang Aem in present-day Khon Kaen Province to the Phimai region and the mouth of the Mun in Ubon Ratchathani province. One (K. 969 / P.Ch. 5), from Prasat Khao Chong Sa Chaeng in Ta Phraya district, Sa Kaeo province, records the digging of a water tank, the Śaṅkara Taṭāka, carrying the pattern south of the Dângrêk range, while others place him up the Mekong as far as Champasak in southern Laos. These were long read as evidence of Chenla administering conquered territory through vassals. Since they proclaim victories without indicating lasting control, Michael Vickery argued that they do not show direct Chenla authority beyond the Dongrek Mountains, the campaigns being temporary expeditions of limited political effect, after which regional inscriptions name no ruler from the Tonlé Sap basin for several centuries.

Proposed locations of ancient polities in the Menam and Mekong Valleys in the 7th century based on the details provided in the Chinese leishu, Cefu Yuangui, and others.

A firmer connection with Chenla may date from the reign of Isanavarman I (r. 616–637), Chinese records placing a polity called Bhīmapura under him which some identify with Vimayapura, Phimai. Others read Chinese accounts of Zhu Jiang and Can Ban as allies of Chenla by marriage to mean that polities of the central plateau and upper Pa Sak basin formed dynastic ties with his court. Much of the plateau seems to have lain where the Chenla and Dvaravati spheres overlapped, but its northeast, covering present-day Nakhon Phanom and Sakon Nakhon with Khammouane province in Laos, appears in Chinese sources of the early 7th century as a Tang division of two districts, Changzhou Prefecture (長州 or 裳州). Hoshino has proposed that the early Tai polities of Gǔ Láng Dòng (古郎洞) and Jūn Nà Lú (君那盧) were situated within this region. However, Changzhou is not mentioned again in the Chinese records after the emergence of Wen Dan, although the relationship between the two remains unclear.

From the mid-7th century Chinese sources suggest Chenla's influence on the plateau weakening, with several polities appearing in the record on their own account. One was Zhān Bó, often placed at Champasri, which sent tribute to China in 657 and may have formed by the merger of Zhān Guo (瞻國) and Bó Guo (博國). Another, Pó Àn (婆岸) in the New Book of Tang, has been tentatively placed around modern Phon District. Hoshino read Zhān Bó, Po An and several states of the Menam valley and the Cham coast as a trans-Mekong trade confederation distinct from the Dvaravati polities of the coast. Following the reign of Jayavarman I (r. 657–681), scholars have proposed that Wen Dan, a polity located in the central Khorat Plateau, separated from Chenla sometime between 681 and 707 before sending its first recorded tributary mission to China in 717. George Cœdès identified this polity with Mūladeśa, a toponym attested in the K.187 inscription. Chinese records further state that, in 755, Wen Dan assisted a native Nghean lord in the wars against the Chinese governor at Jiaozhou, which they won, conquering Jiaozhou, after which the native lord enthroned himself as Hei-ti (lit. 'Black Emperor'). Woodward has likewise suggested that Wen Dan's influence extended beyond the Khorat Plateau into the Si Thep and northern Tonlé Sap regions, where several pre-Angkorian Buddhist and architectural remains have been interpreted as reflecting connections with the Wen Dan cultural sphere.

References to the plateau grow rarer from the 9th century, Wen Dan's last recorded mission to China falling in 799. The plateau and much of present-day Laos are generally held to have entered the "Java Period" in the 9th century, as Angkor rose in the Tonlé Sap basin. Since Java also runs through the Angkorian foundation narratives, what it denotes is much debated: the island of Java, Cham-related polities on the mainland, or other maritime powers of the region. Woodward, surveying the same problem, adds the northern Malay Peninsula, a principality far up the Mekong, and Wen Dan itself to the proposals, and notes that the whole tradition has also been treated as a late myth. Inscriptions of Jayavarman VII (r. 1181–1218) complicate it further, naming a "King of Yavana" beside a "King of Java" and two kings of Champa in one context, so that the terms denote distinct entities that remain unidentified.

Hunter Watson divides the Old Mon corpus of Thailand into three phases, of which the plateau represents the second, of about the eighth to tenth centuries and in a post-Pallava script. Most plateau examples are short texts on sema stones recording meritorious acts and donors' names. They come from Chaiyaphum, Khon Kaen, Udon Thani, Sakon Nakhon, more recently Phetchabun, and a Kalasin province group one of which is dated to 771 CE. Another has long been known from Vientiane province in Laos. Watson cautions that the distribution is not by itself evidence for Dvaravati's extent, since a site yielding such an inscription need not have been affiliated with it. Skilling has likewise suggested that the exceptionally large stone images from Wat Chanthuek and Sung Noen indicate a centre of power and wealth in the area of old Khorat in its own right.

That these religious systems reached small polities far inland is shown by a hoard of silver and gold found in 2008 at Nong Hua Thong in Savannakhet province, Laos, at a fortified settlement on the Xe Bang Fai. Broadly of the eighth to tenth centuries, it holds silver vessels in late Tang style, a silver Garuda and a repoussé plaque of a seated ascetic tentatively identified as Kubera; it is held by the provincial government and closed to study.

Dvaravati–Chenla relations

Copper Plate Inscription of Mueang Uthong

Dvaravati polities of the Chao Phraya basin have been held to have kept dynastic ties with those of the Tonlé Sap basin and the Mekong Delta since the Funan period. George Cœdès suggested that Chakravartin, the father of Prathivindravarman of Si Thep named in the Wang Pai Inscription (K.978), was Rudravarman, last ruler of Funan's Candravaṃśa line. After the brothers Bhavavarman I and Mahendravarman I of the Suryavaṃśa line of Chenla besieged the Funan capital, Rudravarman is said to have fled to Champa and his kin to have scattered to polities such as Pan Pan.

Claude Jacques instead identified Chakravartin with Mahārājādhirāja Śrī Devanika, whom the early 5th-century Devanika Inscription (K.365) describes as having come from a distant land. On his reading Devanika ruled from Si Thep and sent princes to govern cities along the trans-Mekong trade route, perhaps Dong Mueang Aem in Khon Kaen province, Dong Muang Toey in Yasothon province and Vat Phou in southern Laos, the Vat Phou line being later identified as the founding line of Chenla. Zakharova disputes the identification.

Cœdès and Jacques first dated the Wang Pai Inscription to the mid-6th century and took its Bhavavarman for Bhavavarman I of Chenla. Jacques later reread it as naming a local ruler of Si Thep. Kangwon Katchima argues on epigraphic style for a date after 637, which would make the man Bhavavarman II or another local ruler rather than Bhavavarman I, whose authority may have reached no further than south of the Dângrêk Mountains. Anurak Depimai supports Katchima and adds that he cannot be Bhavavarman II either, since the Wat Kud Tae Inscription makes Bhavavarman II the son of Isanavarman I.

Political boundary between Dvaravati and Chenla from the 7th–9th centuries

During the reign of Isanavarman I of Chenla (r. 616–637), attempts were made to extend influence into the Menam Basin, particularly toward the Tou Yuan Kingdom, whose principal center has been proposed to correspond to modern Lopburi or Si Mahosot. A local fable of the Chao Phraya valley ends the conflict in a marriage between a Chenla princess and a Dvaravati ruler. Michael Vickery proposed separately that Harshavarman, who claims descent from Isanavarman as a grandson in the Copper Plate Inscription of Mueang Uthong and later ruled that polity, headed a branch of the Chenla house with a centre of its own in what is now central or eastern Thailand; the plate records the descent but not the marriage it would have come from. Karen Mudar read the plate against the settlement record instead. U Thong's moat encloses 73.3 ha, a district centre in her four-level hierarchy, and on that footing she suggested the inscription may mark lost autonomy rather than a court. Chenla under Isanavarman I also married into Champa and into Dvaravati-sphere polities including Zhu Jiang and Can Ban, and the art of the Menam basin, in the west especially, carries influence from both Chenla and Champa. Dvaravati is also recorded to have established a dynastic connection with a polity in the upper Mun Basin through the marriage of a Dvaravati princess to its ruler, as recorded in the Wat Chanthuek Inscription (K.1009); Skilling has suggested, without deciding, that the polity may have been Cānāśa.

After Isanavarman I's death his successor Bhavavarman II (r. 639–657) appears in the Wat Kud Tae Inscription at war with Dvaravati Sambuka, commonly identified with modern Nakhon Pathom. Tatsuo Hoshino argued that these wars drew in several polities, among them Qiān Zhī Fú (later Gē Luó Shě Fēn), Xiū Luó Fēn and Gān Bì, the New Book of Tang giving 20,000 warriors each to Gē Luó Shě Fēn and Xiū Luó Fēn, 40,000 to the two together and 5,000 to Gān Bì. Tou Yuan, earlier a target of Chenla expansion, is recorded in 647 as a vassal of Dvaravati, and the next year Kalavarnadisharaja (r. 641–700) of Dvaravati Nakhon Pathom founded or refounded the Lavo Kingdom. During the reign of Bhavavarman II of Chenla, Dvaravati polities from the western Menam Basin are described as extending their influence eastward as far as the ancient town of Mueang Phai (เมืองไผ่) in modern Aranyaprathet district, which together with the area around Prasat Khao Noi probably corresponds to the polity named Jyesthapura in the inscriptions, the former seat of Bhavavarman II between 637 and 639. Two pre-Angkorian inscriptions name lords of Jyesthapura in the preceding decades. The badly worn Khao Noi inscription (K. 506 / P.Ch. 16), dated 637, records Vaiṣṇava dedications by Isvarakumara, svāmi of Jyesthapura and bhṛtya or servant of a king identified by Vickery as Isanavarman I and by Claude Jacques as Bhavavarman II; the undated Wat Kud Tae inscription (K. 1150 / P.Ch. 26) gives the same office to Sivadatta, a son of Isanavarman I and elder brother of Bhavavarman II. This period of close contact coincides with a cluster of pre-Angkorian references to syam as toponym or ethnonym, in K.557 (611 CE), K.79 (639), K.127 (683), K.154 (685) and K.904 (713), where it names enslaved persons and at least one landholding official. Scholars read it at this stage as probably a toponym for somewhere in the lower Chao Phraya basin. It disappears from the record after Chenla fragmented in the early 8th century.

In the same period the country northwest of the Tonlé Sap, south of the Dângrêk Mountains and around present-day Battambang Province, is described as breaking into four polities that sent their own embassies to China after leaving Chenla, and by the 720s as falling under Wen Dan, a polity of the Dvaravati sphere. Two sets of Buddhist boundary stones (Bai sema) on Mount Kulen were originally proposed as Wen Dan foundations of the 8th century, an argument its author later withdrew as incautious on the ground that the stones cannot be dated closely enough to establish whether they precede or follow Jayavarman II's accession in 802; the case now rests chiefly on the scarcity of inscriptions and the apparent cessation of monumental building across the Angkor region from about the 720s. Based on this evidence, Hiram W. Woodward suggested that the northern Tonlé Sap region during this period was not under the authority of Lower Chenla but instead formed part of the sphere of Wen Dan, which maintained close relations with, or exercised authority over, Si Thep. Population movements from this region toward Si Thep in the early 8th century are also described as occurring under the auspices of Wen Dan.

The Tonlé Sap polities were then reunified, moving their principal centre north to the Angkor region in the early 9th century. Jayavarman II (r. 780–850), ruler of Lower Chenla and later counted the founder of the Angkorian monarchy, is recorded renewing relations with the Mun–Chi basins, where the former ally Zhu Jiang lay, and meeting Dvaravati Si Thep in the Menam–Pa Sak valleys. Woodward has further proposed that Jayavarman II defeated Wen Dan during this period, after which the remaining Dvaravati-associated Wen Dan region in the Chi valley entered the Javā era. Archaeological and textual evidence suggests that Dvaravati's political predominance was already declining by the early 8th century. Angkor under Rajendravarman II (r. 944–968) took Si Thep in 946, after which the city declined and was abandoned by about the 13th century, as Sukhothai and Ayutthaya rose. Lavapura of Lavo came under Angkorian influence from the 10th century and under Angkorian authority in 1005, under Suryavarman I (r. 1002–1050), who also recovered polities lost to Dvaravati since the 8th century, Jyesthapura in present-day Sa Kaeo Province and Candhrapura in Chanthaburi Province, and took the former Dvaravati vassal Avadhyapura in Prachin Buri Province.

Si Thep dominance

After Chenla fragmented in the early 8th century, Si Thep was then the principal regional power left in the Menam basin. Chinese records place a polity called Qian Zhi Fu (千支弗) at Si Thep in the eastern-central plain, sending its first tribute to the Chinese court about 656–661 under Emperor Gaozong of Tang. The same passage names Duō Mó Cháng (多摩長) as its northern neighbour, and it is Duō Mó Cháng, not Qiān Zhī Fú, that the annals credit with an army of 20,000 men without horses and a territory traversable in a month from east to west and twenty-five days from north to south. Tatsuo Hoshino places Duō Mó Cháng in the river country of present-day northern Thailand, later the Lan Na sphere, which would put Qiān Zhī Fú's northern limit in the upper Menam basin.

By the 8th century Chinese sources add Gē Luó Shě Fēn (歌羅舍分), placed west of Dvaravati. It has been tentatively identified with Qiān Zhī Fú, partly on its phonological match with Jiā Luó Shě Fú (迦逻舍佛), which Hoshino centres at Si Thep with Mueang Sema as a subordinate rather than the seat. On that reading the change of name marks Si Thep's reach spreading over much of the lower Chao Phraya valley, including the former Dvaravati centre at Nakhon Pathom, while Lavo to the east stayed within the older Dvaravati network. Hoshino further took Qiān Zhī Fú for an early Siamese polity, one of several that prospered on the trans-Mekong routes linking Champa with the Menam basin, supported in part by the resemblance of qiān (千) to the later xiān (暹), the term Chinese and Đại Việt sources use for the Siamese polities of the lower basin.

Hiram Woodward reaches a comparable picture from art history rather than the Chinese texts, and from a different premise, that Si Thep itself lay within Wen Dan. A Si Thep strong enough to dominate the 8th century may, he suggests, have held not only Lopburi, which the reading above places outside its sphere, but Nakhon Pathom, U Thong and even Khu Bua further west. Central Dvaravati might then divide into pre- and post-Wen Dan phases. He offers this as a possibility, with the alternative that the Dvaravati features at Si Thep came from a peaceful movement of monks before Wen Dan's rise rather than from conquest. On Hoshino's identification of Chinese toponyms other than Wen Dan with Si Thep, which the reading above rests on, Woodward reserves judgement and holds that historical geographers who know the Chinese texts will have to review the evidence.

The proposed expansion of Si Thep's sphere is also consistent with a lapse in the later dynastic traditions of both upper and lower basins. The tradition records Sai Thong Som at Nakhon Pathom and his brother Balipatijaya at Lavo as the last recorded rulers of this line, but names no successors. The only later ruler associated with the area is known from an inscription: K.577, found at Lopburi and dated to the 8th or 9th century, identifies Nāyaka Ārjava as a son of the king of Sambuka, a name several scholars have associated with Nakhon Pathom. The tradition records no successor to Balidhiraja at Sukhothai either, leading some local scholars to suggest that the city was abandoned. Hoshino's reading of the Chinese records instead places the area within the territory of Qiān Zhī Fú, extending northward to the mountain range. These dynastic gaps fall within the period in which Si Thep has been proposed to have extended its influence across the Menam basin, although no study has explicitly connected the two.

By the 9th century, Indaprasthanagara, situated in the central plain between Nakhon Pathom and Si Thep, had entered a period of instability marked by rapid succession. The chronicle describes a major flood followed by an attack from Ayojjhapura, which some scholars identify with Si Thep, after which much of the population dispersed. Meanwhile, epigraphic evidence indicates continued political activity in the Si Thep region through the 9th and early 10th centuries, with the Śrī Canāśa Inscription (K.949) recording Bhagadatta and his successors from 859 CE. Si Thep's dominance potentially ended with its conquest by Angkor in 946.

Late Dvaravati: 9th – 11th centuries

Artistic reconstructions of men’s dress from the Dvaravati period (prior to the 11th century CE), produced by the Fine Arts Department based on archaeological evidence.

Costumes of a man and a woman in the Dvaravati period, reconstructed from terracotta figures found at Khu Bua, Ratchaburi Province.

Economic and archaeological transformations

Some scholars date this period to the 9th and 10th centuries, others carry the Dvaravati cultural horizon into the 11th. Economic conditions in the western Menam valley changed, and trade with the Tang dynasty along Maritime Silk Road routes is attested, while the valley polities suffered the incursions the sources associate with the end of the Dvaravati period in the 11th century. Survey around the former centre at Mueang Uthong shows low settlement density in this phase and abandonment in the 12th century, though trade between U Thong and Tang China in the 9th and 10th is documented. Against this contraction, Tambralinga's conquest of the lower Menam basin in the early 10th century shifted the balance: Nakhon Pathom, identified as Mevilimbangam, prospered on maritime trade as Srivijaya rose, with little political weight, and local traditions call the city Śrīvijaya, while Lavo rose as a regional centre under Angkorian control from the 11th century.

Regional power reconfiguration

After Tambralinga briefly took Lavo in 927 and Angkor annexed Si Thep in 949, authority over the Sukhothai region named in the Northern Chronicle seems to have passed to Haripuñjaya kings in the 950s. Several Dvaravati polities were attacked or displaced in these years. The Yonok Chronicle has Suphannaphum in the western Menam valley assaulted in the 930s, its two princes fleeing north into Haripuñjaya, while Tambralinga campaigns launched from Lavo towards Haripuñjaya all failed. In the same years the Ayutthaya Testimonies has Sudhammaraja move the centre of the early Siamese polity north from the central Menam valley to Phitsanulok in 937. By the mid-10th century, Lavo itself is said to have come under the authority of Indaprasthanagara, a transition associated with the tradition of Sricandradhipati, described as a commoner from Lavo who rose to become ruler of Sukhothai in 959. Later in the same century, Ipoia Sanne Thora Thesma Teperat is said to have transferred his seat of power from Indaprasthanagara to Lavo's Lavapura.

By circa 1001–1005, Lavo had fallen under Angkorian authority during the reign of Suryavarman I, prompting the Siamese monarch Visnuraja at Phitsanulok to relocate southwestward to Phetchaburi. The main evidence for the campaign is the Khmer inscription K.1198 of 1014, now in the National Museum of Cambodia, recording the career of Lakṣmīpativarman, a general charged by Suryavarman I with governing Rāmanya, a form of Rāmañña denoting the Mon, "who occupy the western region". Its Sanskrit verses lament that Lavapura had been reduced to jungle by the defects of the Kali Age and state that its long-abandoned western districts were to be restored and repopulated. U-tain Wongsathit and his co-authors, publishing the Sanskrit portion in 2019, read one campaign running from Angkor by way of Phanom Rung and Phanom Wan, where a rebellion of two local families was put down in 1011, to Lavapura, and call it the first explicit epigraphic notice of Dvaravati falling to a Khmer army; on their reading the conquest falls between 1011 and 1014 rather than at the century's opening. Walailak Songsiri rejects the chain of identifications that reading rests on. The earliest attested Mon form, rmeñ, occurs in an inscription of Kyansittha of Pagan dated 1102, nearly a century after Suryavarman I, and the Middle Mon rman was probably taken from Pali by way of Haripuñjaya, while the ramañ of the pre-Angkorian Prasat Bassac inscription (K.71) is a slave's name. She adds that the inscription calls the region Madhyadeśa, that Lakṣmīpativarman's family came from the Mekong basin in the east, that inscriptions at Lavo about ten years later record accommodation between Brahmanical and Mahayana practice, that none describes a war leaving the country deserted, and that no Angkorian inscription of the whole period records a western campaign on the scale of the wars with Champa. In 1052, the Angkorian ruler at Lavo was defeated by a king of Haripuñjaya, who installed his younger brother Chandrachota as the new ruler; shortly thereafter, the Siamese ruler Srisimha returned from Phetchaburi to the central Menam valley. The Burmese chronicle Hmannan Yazawin records that in 1056 the Gywan warriors — described as descendants of the Thai Yuan and located by the chronicle in a southeastern land called Ayoja — marched against the Thaton kingdom, then in the process of annexation by Pagan, an episode corroborated by Burmese inscriptions from the Arakan Pagoda in Mandalay. The chronicles of Thaton likewise mention an attack by the Krom, with both ethnonyms likely referring to the Khom people. George Cœdès proposed that Ayoja corresponds to Ayudhya or Siam.

Events at Angkor shaped the region too. The Mahidharapura line of the Phimai region lost Angkor and Preah Vihear to Suryavarman I about 1010 in a succession struggle, and the rival claimant Jayavirahvarman withdrew towards Phimai, where an inscription of 1008 records his donation to the god Vimāya after the loss of Angkor. Readings of the Preah Vihear inscription suggest the ruling elite was then stripped of authority, some scholars proposing a displacement into what is now upper northeastern Thailand. The line reappears in the north late in the following century, and here the evidence is epigraphic rather than chronicle. Pha Mueang, lord of Mueang Rad, received from the ruler at Angkor a Khmer title, a regalia sword and a princess in marriage. The princess is named Sukhara Mahadevi and associated with the court of Jayavarman VII, and the marriage has been read as the means by which the displaced line recovered standing in the region through the Tai Lueang (ไทเลือง) house.

These northern developments met events in the upper Menam valley. The Northern Chronicle has a coalition of Tai Yuan mueang under Śrīdharmatripiṭaka (ศรีธรรมไตรปิฎก) of Ngoenyang Chiang Saen move south during the reign of Suvacanaraja of Mueang Chaliang, which began about the 1050s. The conflict was settled by negotiation and by Suvacanaraja giving his only daughter to Śrīdharmatripiṭaka in marriage, who is also credited with rebuilding Phitsanulok. In the lower basin the death of Narai of Ayodhya in 1087 without an heir set off a two-year succession war among nine royal houses, won by Phra Chao Luang. Śrīdharmatripiṭaka is said to have moved from Chiang Saen to Phitsanulok in 1106 and ruled there until his death. Scholars generally assign these campaigns to a later period than the text's own date of about 1500 BE (957/58 CE).

The union of the Śrīdharmatripiṭaka and Suvacanaraja houses is said to have produced two princes, the elder of whom, Kesariraja, became ruler of Lavo, his reign generally dated from about 1106. A son of his, Duangkrian Krishnaraja (ดวงเกรียนกฤษณะราช), is said to have married a Xiān princess, a daughter of Phra Chao Luang (r. 1089–1111) of Ayodhya, extending the ties between the northern Tai Lueang houses and the Siamese polities downstream. From the late 12th to the mid-14th century a Tai Lueang house traced to Sri Naw Nam Thum appears to have held the upper eastern Menam valley, above all the lower Nan River basin in Uttaradit and Phitsanulok province. It passed to the Xiān line of Si Inthrathit under Maha Thammaracha I, who is said to have moved the capital from Sukhothai to Phitsanulok in 1349.

Against this background, the traditions of the middle Mekong and Khorat Plateau have been discussed in relation to the proposed displacement of members of the Angkorian Mahidharapura ruling elite mentioned above. These traditions consistently refer to regional rulers as Phaya Khom (พญาขอม), an epithet commonly associated with rulers of the Angkorian sphere, and preserve accounts of political relationships among the principal muang of the region.

Power networks of Khorat Plateau and Middle Mekong

The middle Mekong and Khorat Plateau long formed a transitional zone between the Dvāravatī sphere and the pre-Angkorian polities. Wen Dan last sent an embassy to the Tang court in 799 and then leaves the record, as Angkor became the dominant power and, on the archaeological evidence, the middle Mekong was drawn into its sphere from about the 9th century. Contemporary written sources are scarce thereafter, so later local traditions carry much of the weight in reconstructing the region between Dvāravatī and Angkor.

Among these traditions, the Urangkhathat (ตำนานอุรังคธาตุ), the foundation legend of Phra That Phanom, preserves the broadest account of the political geography of the middle Mekong. Its political network has been dated to the 10th century and after, chiefly from the earliest architectural phase of Phra That Phanom's stupa, which predates the later Lao and Isan renovations. The Urangkhathat presents not a unified kingdom but a network of connected polities. Its centres are Sri Kotabun (ศรีโคตรบอง), Nong Han Luang (หนองหานหลวง), identified with Sakon Nakhon, and Nong Han Noi (หนองหานน้อย) or Khun Khom Nakhon (ขุนขอมนคร), in the Kumphawapi area of Udon Thani province. It sets these centres in a wider landscape reaching Candrapuri (Vientiane), Sri Sattanak (Luang Prabang), Chulani Phromathat, associated with the Cham polity at modern Huế, and Indaprasthanagara, whose location is disputed. That chronology places this world in the transition during which Dvāravatī influence receded and Angkorian integration moved north across the middle Mekong.

Within this political landscape, the Urangkhathat assigns particular prominence to Saket Nakhon Roi Et Pratu (สาเกตุนครร้อยเอ็ดประตู; lit. 'Saket, city of a hundred-and-one gates'), describing it as a paramount centre paired in status with Yothika (โยธิกา), or Kurunta (กุรุนทะ), or Ayodhya in the Menam Valley. Its ruler, Phaya Suriyawongsa Sitthidet, is read as holding ritual overlordship over subordinate polities whose rulers acknowledged him by presenting gold and silver flowers each year. "Roi Et", a hundred and one, is generally taken as a symbol of pre-eminence rather than a count of dependent towns, and "Saket", an Indian toponym tied to Ayodhya in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain tradition, as borrowed sacred geography legitimising regional kingship rather than evidence of contact with India.

A more localized account of political organization on the northern Khorat Plateau, focused specifically on the Nong Han–Sakon Nakhon area already named in the Urangkhathat, survives in the legend of Phadaeng Nang Ai. The legend portrays a monarch known by the common epithet Phaya Khom (พญาขอม) as the ruler of Muang Nong Han. Charles F. Keyes, followed by some later local traditions, identified this polity with present-day Nong Han in Udon Thani Province. Both Nong Han Udon Thani and Nong Han Sakon Nakhon have rectangular, Angkorian-style moated plans. The earliest Lao accounts, however, anchor the Phaya Khom narrative to the Sakon Nakhon site, against the reading that ties the legend to Udon Thani. According to these accounts, Phaya Khom appointed his two sons to govern Muang Chiang Hian–Ban Iat (เมืองเชียงเหียน–บ้านเอียด, in present-day Mueang Maha Sarakham district) and Muang Si Kaeo–Phak Waen (เมืองสีแก้ว–ผักแว่น, in modern Changhan district), while his two grandsons were assigned to rule Muang Hong–Muang Thong (เมืองหงส์–เมืองทอง, in Chaturaphak Phiman district) and Muang Pheng (เมืองแพง, in modern Ban Phaeng in Kosum Phisai district), a structure the legend preserves. Some versions of the legend also incorporate Muang Fa Daet into this dynastic network. The final episode has Phaya Khom's Muang Nong Han sink beneath the water. That fits Sakon Nakhon better than Nong Han in Udon Thani, since the northern sector of the old moated city at Sakon Nakhon lies low and floods seasonally. The Urangkhathat attaches the same submersion motif to Khun Khom Nakhon in its account of Nong Han Noi. Beyond the dynastic successions and inter-polity relations they state, these traditions have not been systematically interpreted.

The lower Mun basin followed a different course. In the late pre-Angkorian period the southern plateau belonged to the loosely organised "land Chenla", where Dvāravatī culture spread without a strong central authority, giving rise to a polity generally identified as Canasapura centred on Mueang Sema in present-day Nakhon Ratchasima province. From the 9th century the region was drawn into the Angkorian sphere. Angkorian influence overlaid the existing Dvāravatī landscape rather than replacing it, producing a mixed Dvāravatī and Khmer material culture across southern Isan, while inscriptions from Mueang Sema still placed the polity outside "Kambujadesa", Angkor proper. Integration continued through the 10th and into the 11th century, visible under Jayavarman V (r. 968–1001), whose court brahmin Yajñavaraha founded religious establishments and left inscriptions at Mueang Sema, and under Suryavarman I (r. 1002–1050), when Prasat Preah Vihear was built on the Dângrêk escarpment above the region. Where local tradition on the middle Mekong preserved a network of semi-autonomous centres, the southern Mun basin was absorbed piece by piece into the Angkorian state.

Pagan expansion and final decline

The 1056 Gywan incursion has been taken to mark Anawrahta of the Pagan Kingdom extending his authority into the lower Menam basin, in the course of which Dvaravati Nakhon Pathom may have been destroyed about 1058 and Lavo submitted. Several urban centres appear to have been destroyed, and Nakhon Pathom to have lost most of its population between the 11th and 12th centuries. It had already been weakened by the wars between Haripuñjaya and Lavo in the early 10th century and was reportedly raided in the late 1020s or early 1030s during the Southeast Asian campaign of the Chola ruler Rajendra I.

The Northern Chronicle further records that the Pagan noble Kar Tayy exercised political authority over the Suphannaphum–Mueang Uthong region from approximately 1081 to 1121, after which Mueang Uthong was abandoned and Suphannaphum to have lacked a ruler. Another passage of the chronicle recounts a Pagan invasion of the newly refounded Ayodhya in 1087; although Ayodhya is said to have prevailed, its ruler, Narai I, is recorded as having died in the same year. Around the same period, the Legend of Nakhon Si Thammarat refers to a foreign ruler, Sri Dharmasokaraja I, said to have originated from Pagan's Hanthawaddy, who governed Indaprasthanagara–Lavo in the east–central Menam valley until around 1117 before moving southward to establish his rule at Nakhon Si Thammarat; this interval also witnessed the relocation of the Xiān royal seat under Surindraraja northward from Phraek Si Racha to Chai Nat.

Taken together these accounts suggest about a century of Pagan penetration into the Menam valley, which agrees with the early 13th-century Zhu Fan Zhi placing Pagan on Chenla's western border. After Sri Dharmasokaraja I left, Angkor recovered Lavo and pushed into the Menam basin again, which fits the Banteay Chhmar Inscription, where Jayavarman VII and his son march against an invasion from the west, and the Prasat Tor Inscription, where he defeats the monarch of the west in 1189/90 or 1195/96. Baker and Pasuk read the Banteay Chhmar text more narrowly. It has Jayavarman VII and his son resisting an army in the west without saying how far west, so it does not fix how far Angkorian arms reached.

Post-Dvaravati: 12th – 13th centuries

Interpretative illustrations of attire worn by communities in Lavo during a period of strong Angkorian influence, c. 11th–14th centuries CE.

Reconstructed traditional dress of communities in the upper Menam Valley during the 13th–14th centuries, showing influences from Mon Dvaravati, Tai Lan Na, and Khmer Angkorian styles.

Regional transformation

The 12th and 13th centuries were a transitional phase of fragmentation and competition among new centres in the Menam and Mae Klong River basins, several of which became the attested Siamese states of Phrip Phri, Suphannaphum, Suvarnapura, Sukhothai and Ayutthaya. The old supra-regional centres lost their prominence. Si Thep stayed under Angkorian authority but declined politically and economically and is generally held to have been abandoned by about the 13th century. Nakhon Pathom and its associated site of Khu Bua appear to have lost much of their population, while authority moved to the Mae Klong basin, to modern Ratchaburi and Mueang Sa Kosi Narai (เมืองสระโกสินารายณ์). These two sites have respectively been identified with Jaya Rajapuri and Sambukapattana as mentioned in the Preah Khan Inscription (K.904), both exhibit clear Angkorian cultural influence, as does the nearby site of Pong Tuek.

Ruins in Mueang Sing Historical Park, western Menam valley, dating to the late 12th–early 13th century and reflecting strong Angkorian Bayon–style architectural influence.

Wat Chedi Chet Thaeo in Si Satchanalai, built around the 13th century, shows an influence of Lanka, Lan Na, Pagan, and Ayutthaya to the Sukhothai architecture style

The principal power in the western Menam valleys now seems to have been Mueang Sing, in the present-day Mueang Sing Historical Park, with the eastern plain based at Lopburi, which alternated between Angkorian control and local autonomy. The Preah Khan Inscription names them Sri Jayasimhapuri and Lavodayapura. How far Angkorian authority reached over the Menam valleys from Jayavarman VII's time is debated. The hospitals (arogyasala) and fire houses (vahnigrha) built along the roads out of Angkor reach no further west than Prachin Buri, which suggests that the same inscription's dispatch of the image Jayabuddhamahanatha to at least six Menam polities was cultural diplomacy rather than direct control. Baker and Pasuk point to several forms of negative evidence. Angkorian inscriptions and reliefs record numerous campaigns to the east but only one ambiguous notice of a western campaign, the Banteay Chhmar text. The Menam plain lacks the temple-endowment inscriptions typical of Angkorian provinces, while references to officials bearing Khmer titles are sparse. Angkorian records also detail resource transfers without documenting flows from the plain, and Hermann Kulke argues that the Angkorian heartland was largely self-sufficient. Angkorian influence in the plain was therefore uneven, and Srisakra Vallibhotama argues that local rulers selectively adopted Angkorian political and ritual forms without necessarily falling under direct Angkorian administration.

Mueang Sing in Kanchanaburi shows how mixed that interaction was. Its architecture and ornament closely follow the Bayon style of Jayavarman VII's reign, but archaeologists suggest that only the master craftsmen came from Angkor or from the Angkorian centre at Lavodayapura, the rest of the work being local. The site lacks symmetry and proportional coherence and places some structures inconsistently, and the inscriptions on the sandstone sculpture bases are in Late Angkorian script and language, so parts of it may have been finished or altered after his reign. Excavation has yielded a little Ming Chinese ceramic alongside Sukhothai wares, too little to show sustained occupation after the Angkorian period.

How Lavo's relationship with Angkor over the 10th to 13th centuries should be read is disputed. On one account Lavo was under Angkorian control throughout, sent independent missions to China when Angkor was distracted by succession disputes, and broke free before 1289. Baker and Pasuk prefer a relationship that was always somewhat flexible. In Suryavarman II's procession on the southern gallery at Angkor Wat, Jayasinhavarman of Lavo rides almost as grandly as the king himself, his troops in elaborate animal-head helmets; Suryavarman II patronised Buddhism at Lopburi rather than the Saivism of his own capital; and the Lopburi rulers married into Pagan as well as Angkor.

During this period, several polities were recorded by Chinese merchants between 1103 and 1115, during the Song dynasty. A number of these have been tentatively identified as being located in the lower Menam basin, including Zhēn Lǐ Fù (真里富), Róng Lǐ (茸里), Luó Hú (罗斛), and Xún Fān (浔番). It is possible that conflicts among these polities occurred during this transitional phase. Epigraphy suggests growing linguistic diversity in the lower Menam basin. Thai lexical items have been identified inside inscriptions otherwise in Pali, Sanskrit and Old Khmer: the Dong Mae Nang Mueang inscription (K.766) of 1167, the Phra Phuttharup Nak Prok inscription (K.995) of 1213, and the Mueang Sing inscription (กจ. 4), tentatively of the 13th or 14th century. Their script also differs markedly from that of inscriptions in Jayavarman VII's sphere, in the Phimai, Surin, Buriram and Angkor regions. The latest of these inscriptions records the name of a local ruler, Phraya Chaiyakon (พฺรญาไชยกร). Comparable evidence of linguistic development may also be found in an original section of the Pre-Ayutthaya legal manuscript Phra Aiyakan Betset, which contains an internal date corresponding to 1224 CE and is written entirely in Thai, exhibiting archaic linguistic features and phraseology reminiscent of the Sukhothai Ram Khamhaeng Inscription.

Emergence of Siamese polities

Later traditions and epigraphy show several regional ruling lines emerging in the Menam valley during the 12th century. After Sri Dharmasokaraja I moved to Nakhon Si Thammarat in 1117, readings of the Dong Mè Nang Mưo'ng Inscription (K.766) of 1168 have his successor Sri Dharmasokaraja II recover Lavo in 1157 and push north towards present-day Nakhon Sawan, consolidating the central valley by winning the loyalty of Dhanyapuri, named in the same inscription.

Around the same period, later traditions describe a northward shift of several Siamese political centres. The Ayutthaya Testimonies record that Suryaraja relocated to Kamphaeng Phet in 1156, while Pra Poa Noome Thele Seri — according to Du Royaume de Siam and the Instructions Given to the Siamese Envoys Sent to Portugal (1684) — moved to the Nakhon Thai–Sukhothai region in 1155, and his younger brother Uthong I is mentioned in the Northern Chronicle as having established himself at Mueang Chaliang. Subsequent sources indicate that these Siamese rulers later moved to reclaim their footing in the lower western Menam valleys, including the Suphannaphum–Phrip Phri–Jayasimhapuri region during the 1160s, where Jatiraja (ชาติราชา) is described as exercising authority at Jayasimhapuri, and where Pra Poa Noome Thele Seri subsequently succeeded him in the 1170s. The line associated with Suryaraja, by contrast, expanded northward and forged alliances with Tai chiefdoms, laying the political foundation for what is conventionally identified as the Sukhothai Kingdom.

The Nakhon Si Thammarat Chronicle agrees, recording fighting in the lower valleys and Sri Dharmasokaraja's extension of authority over Menam polities, and noting that although he is called a ruler of Nakhon Si Thammarat he was then governing from another seat it does not name. The riverine powers recovered these territories, he withdrew south to Nakhon Si Thammarat, and they pursued him in the 1190s down the Malay Peninsula to a confrontation settled by negotiation around present-day Prachuap Khiri Khan.

Tai–Xiān–Angkorian interactions across the Mekong and Menam basins

The nine-year contest between the Angkorian claimants Jayavirahvarman of the Phimai region and Suryavarman I of the eastern and northeastern territories ended in Suryavarman's victory in 1010, after which he is said to have campaigned against several cities of the Phimai region to check the Mahidharapura clan. The Preah Vihear Inscription then has him take over the polities of the Preah Vihear region associated with that line and force the clan north. Where it went is disputed; some propose present-day Sakon Nakhon in upper Northeast Thailand, citing a large triangular moated settlement with Angkorian-period artefacts and ruins of the Mahidharapura era.

In the north the Mahidharapura line may have met a Tai Lueang (ไทเลือง) polity and married into its house: an inscription has the Tai prince Pha Mueang marry Sukhara Mahadevi, a Mahidharapura princess often identified as a daughter of Jayavarman VII. The Tai Lueang also married into the northern Xiān polity of the Menam basin, Pha Mueang's sister Nang Sueang marrying Si Intharathit, then governor of Mueang Bang Yang, identified with present-day Nakhon Thai; Si Intharathit is recorded as the son of Candraraja's consort Nang Nak (นางนาค), whose own affiliation has been argued from the Tai pattern of her name. The Tai Lueang lineage is believed to have subsequently established control over areas along the Nan River in the upper Menam Basin, centering its authority at Mueang Rad (เมืองราด), tentatively identified by some scholars as Mueang Thung Yang in present-day Uttaradit province. Comparable dynastic links may also have extended southward. During roughly the same period, Jayasena, a Tai prince of this polity identified in the Northern Chronicle as Phichai Chiang Mai (พิชัยเชียงใหม่), is said to have married a princess of the southern Xiān ruling line, identified as a daughter of Uthong II of Ayodhya. Through this union between these two dynasties, Jayasena reportedly succeeded his father-in-law as ruler of Ayodhya.

Approximate greatest extent of Tai Yuan Ngoenyang following Chueang's southern campaign in the 1150s.

The Sakon Nakhon hypothesis draws some support from a Vietnamese inscription of 1159 commemorating Duke Đỗ Anh Vũ. It records that in 1135, after the Mahidharapura recovery of the Angkorian throne under Jayavarman VI in the 1080s, Văn Đan, generally identified with present-day Vientiane in the same stretch of the middle Mekong, and described as under Zhenla, attacked Nghệ An and was driven off, the duke pursuing it as far as Vũ Ôn, an unidentified place, and returning with captives. In the aftermath of these events, the Chiang Mai Chronicle and the Chronicle of Chiang Saen relate that Tai groups from this area, including those associated with Candrapuri (modern Vientiane), Muang Sua (modern Luang Phrabang), and Mueang Kaew Prakan (later known as Muang Phuan), marched northward and launched attacks against Ngoenyang of Tai Yuan in the 1150s. These campaigns were ultimately repelled by the legendary Chueang, who is said to have conquered the invading polities and brought them under his authority.

Interpretive reconstruction of the political network described in the Tamnan Fa Daet Song Yang, showing the Northern Alliance led by Muang Chiang Som (brown), the rival Southern Alliance led by Muang Fa Daet (blue), and neighboring contemporary polities (black).

The regional geopolitical shifts initiated by Chueang’s conquests and the subsequent collapse of the pre-existing Angkorian–Sakon Nakhon network are reflected in the historical memory of the surrounding frontier regions. In the northern and central Korat Plateau, another legend, Tamnan Fa Daet Song Yang (ตำนานฟ้าแดดสงยาง), records the resulting political fragmentation of the region but makes no mention of either an Angkorian-associated Phaya Khom or his polity of Muang Nong Han, nor of Saket Nakhon Roi Et Pratu (สาเกตุนครร้อยเอ็ดประตู), which was previously referenced in the Urangkhathat. Instead, it recounts the migration of several new royal lineages from the northern region into the Chi River Basin. One lineage established its authority at Muang Fa Daet–Muang Song Yang and allied with four capital-and-viceroy pairs of muang to the south: Muang Chiang Hian–Ban Iat, Muang Si Kaeo–Phak Waen, Muang Hong–Muang Thong and Muang Pheng. All four also appear in the legend of Phadaeng Nang Ai as remnants of the earlier Sakon Nakhon-linked network. Another royal lineage settled farther north in the Lam Pao basin. There Muang Chiang Som (เมืองเชียงโสม) under Phaya Cantharat became the centre of a small mandala, with the muang of Chiang Song (เชียงส่ง), Chiang Sa (เชียงสา), Chiang Khua (เชียงเคือ), Chiang Choi (เชียงส้อย) and Sabut (สาบุตร์) subordinate to it. This Chiang Som polity also maintained an alliance with Chiang Yun (เชียงยืน) in the middle Chi Basin. The legend further recounts a prolonged rivalry between the Fa Daet and Chiang Som factions, characterized by alternating victories and defeats, in which the defeated polity periodically became a tributary of the victor, only for the political relationship to be reversed following subsequent conflicts. In the final campaign, Chiang Som polity received military support from numerous muang, including Muang Meng (เมืองเม็ง), Muang Man (เมืองม่าน), Muang Kula (เมืองคุลา), Muang Yuan (เมืองญวน), Muang Lao (เมืองลาว), Muang Lue (เมืองลื้อ), Muang Khmen (เมืองเขมร), and Muang Koi Kai (เมืองโกยกาย), whose historical identification has yet to be studied systematically, ultimately securing a decisive victory over the Muang Fa Daet faction. This local pattern of dynamic factional alignment and dynastic intermarriage mirrored the larger-scale political transformations occurring concurrently in the upper Menam basin.

Following the Mahidharapura dynasty's successive reclamations of the Angkorian throne under Jayavarman VI in the 1080s and by Jayavarman VII in the 1180s, the Tai Lueang polity, led by Sri Naw Nam Thum and his son Pha Mueang, appears to have expanded its influence throughout the upper Menam basin. During the early 13th century, this lineage is said to have asserted authority over Mueang Chaliang and subsequently established control over Sukhothai by overthrowing the Mon ruler E Daeng Phloeng around 1219. However, an epigraphic account associated with the Khom Sabat Khlon Lamphong corpus suggests that political control later shifted to another ruling lineage distinct from the Tai Lueang-linked house. This transition appears to have prompted a joint military intervention by the dynastically allied Tai Lueang and Xian rulers. Their combined forces led by Pha Mueang and Si Intharathit are subsequently described as having removed this rival ruler from power and restored influence over Sukhothai in 1238. In theoretical reconstructions of early Thai political history, this event has been regarded as one of the formative moments associated with the foundation of the Sukhothai Kingdom.

Formation of Ayodhya

Aerial view of an ancient site at Nong Chaeng village, Don Chedi, Suphan Buri province, taken in 1953, which has been proposed as one of the regional centers of Chen Li Fu.

Around the 1180s–1190s, following the loss of control over Lavo in 1157, Angkorian authority is said to have been reasserted in the region, as indicated by the Prasat Tor Inscription which records that Jayavarman VII defeated a "monarch of the west" in either 1189/90 or 1195/96, and by reports that Sri Dharmasokaraja II returned to Nakhon Si Thammarat. In the same period, the central Menam valley is described in Chinese sources as having come under the control of its former ruling line led by Pra Poa Noome Thele Seri and being referred to as Chen Li Fu, a polity corresponding broadly to Indaprasthanagara. In the Ayutthaya Testimonies, Indaprasthanagara dynasty is described as belonging to the same lineage as the early Sukhothai monarchs, while Walailak Songsiri suggests that the Indic name borne by the ruler of Chen Li Fu may have been that of a prominent ruler from the polities north of the Dangrek range, taken up as a formal style for use with the Chinese court and perhaps accompanied by kinship ties. In contrast, the 1225 Chinese work Zhu Fan Zhi by Zhao Rukuo lists Lavo, Chu fan chi, and Pagan as tributary states of Angkor. Earlier scholarship interpreted the Pagan mentioned in this text as referring to the lower Irrawaddy basin in present-day Myanmar; however, it has also been proposed that it instead denoted the lower Menam basin under Sri Dharmasokaraja II, an interpretation that draws support from the Phatthalung version of the Legend of Nakhon Si Thammarat, which states that his father originated from Bago in Myanmar, while Chu fan chi is generally identified with Chen Li Fu.

In the lower western valley, through a royal intermarriage, the southern Siamese lineage claimed the throne of Ayodhya in 1205 under the rule of a Siamese–Mon–Chinese–Cham heritage Uthong II, set it as new seat replacing Indaprasthanagara of Chen Li Fu. This dynasty further established marital alliances with the Mon ruling house of Haripuñjaya at Mueang Chaliang, from which emerged the mixed Mon–Chinese princes Dhammaraja and Baramaraja later ruled Ayodhya during the early to mid-14th century. On this basis, some scholar has argued that the Siamese seizure of power at Ayodhya was facilitated, at least in part, by Chinese support. Reflecting its maritime orientation and external political connections, this polity was identified as Xiān in a number of Chinese and Đại Việt sources. A prince of this lineage, Varashreṣṭhakumāra, who ruled at Phrip Phri, later ascended the Ayodhya throne under the regnal name Ramathibodi I (Uthong V) in 1341 and reinforced his position through marriage alliances with Lavo to the east and the Tai–Siamese Suphannaphum to the west. The unification of these four centers in the lower river valleys culminated in the traditional foundation of the Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1351.

Despite the emergence of Ayutthaya as a new political entity, the legacy of Dvaravati continued to be preserved in nomenclature and historical memory. The full ceremonial name of the capital—Krung Thep Dvāravatī Śrī Ayutthayā (กรุงเทพทวารวดีศรีอยุธยา)—explicitly invoked Dvaravati as a former seat of royal authority. The style is carried by the preambles to three sections of the Three Seals Law Code — the laws on witnesses, on royal legislation, and on ordeal by water or fire — in their fuller form Krung-deb-dvāravatī-śrī-ayudhyā-mahātilakabhaba-nabaratana-rājadhānī-purīramya, and recurs in diplomatic usage from a letter sent by the governor of Tenasserim to the Danish court in 1620 and the Thai text of the 1664 treaty with the Dutch East India Company to a Pāli letter addressed to the court of Kandy in 1757 and, as late as 1842, an inscription set up in Cambodia by Chaophraya Bodindecha. Regional traditions likewise maintained this association. The Laotian Phra That Phanom Chronicle refers to Ayodhya prior to 1351 as Dvāravatī and Śrī Ayodhiyā Dvāravatī Nakhon (ศรีอโยธิยาทวารวดีนคร). Corroborating evidence appears in Burmese epigraphic sources. A 1768 inscription of Hsinbyushin of Ava (Serial No. 1128), discovered on a bronze cannon at at Shwezigon Pagoda—acquired by Burmese forces following the second fall of Ayutthaya in 1767 CE—records the “conquest of Dvāravatī” in reference to Ayutthaya. This nomenclatural continuity is further reflected within Ayutthaya’s mandala. A subordinate polity, Suphannaphum, bore the extended designation Dvāravatī Śrī Suphannaphum (ทวารวดีศรีสุพรรณภูมิ), indicating the persistence of Dvaravati-derived prestige titles at the regional level. The usage was not universal, however: other sections of the same law code, and works including the Ratanabimbavaṃsa (1429), the Jinakalamali (c. 1516), the Yuan Phai and the Dansai inscription of 1560, name the capital without Dvāravatī at all, as do most official and literary works of the Ayutthaya and Bangkok periods. Skilling accordingly treats it as an open question whether the surviving instances preserve a continuous memory of the polity or represent a later literary and diplomatic revival of the name; Prince Dhani Nivat's 1939 study in the Journal of the Siam Society remains the standard treatment. By the late 14th and 15th centuries, all former Dvaravati principalities, including Lavo, Suphannaphum, and the northern cities of the former Sukhothai Kingdom, had been incorporated into Ayutthaya. This process was completed between 1388 and 1438.

Pre-Lan Xang political networks in the Korat Plateau

With the Dvaravati and Angkorian networks in decline, the Khorat Plateau passed through a transition in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. No single successor state took it. It became a frontier where three spheres overlapped: the failing authority of Angkor over its Mahidharapura- and Sakon Nakhon-linked networks, the expanding Siamese kingdoms of Sukhothai and later Ayutthaya, and the unconsolidated Lao mueang of the middle Mekong, which Fa Ngum united as Lan Xang in 1353. Direct epigraphic and archaeological evidence is thin. The political geography is reconstructed largely from later chronicles, retrospective place names and comparison with Angkorian and early Lao sources, so many identifications remain provisional.

One long-standing debate concerns the location of Mueang Rad (เมืองราด), the polity ruled by Pho Khun Pha Mueang (fl. late 12th – mid 13th-c.) in the traditional founding narrative of Sukhothai. Manit Vallibhotama identified it with the moated site of Mueang Kao (Khorakhapura; also called Nakhon Raj)–Mueang Sema in modern Sung Noen district, Nakhon Ratchasima province, while Chit Phumisak later supported this interpretation through toponymic analysis. Other scholars instead place Mueang Rad in the lower Nan basin near modern Uttaradit or Pa Sak Valley in present-day Phetchabun province, or suggest that Pho Khun Pha Mueang ruled more than one polity. The Khorat hypothesis has also been questioned because the Phimai corridor appears to have remained aligned with Angkor until the early 15th century, when Ayutthaya launched a separate campaign to secure the region before the sack of Angkor Thom in 1431. Another perspective is provided by the Lao chronicle tradition surrounding Fa Ngum's campaigns in the early 1350s. The Lan Xang Chronicle records the conquest of Mueang Phrommathat, identified by later scholars as Phimai, followed by campaigns against several neighbouring centres across the Khorat Plateau, including Ho Roi Et Pratu, Phon Phing Daet, and other subordinate mueang identified with sites in present-day northeastern Thailand. Because these accounts were compiled centuries after the events they describe and incorporate legendary material, their place identifications remain tentative.

The archaeology gives a different picture. Surveys of early Lan Xang settlement centre on the Loei–Nong Bua Lam Phu–Udon Thani–Nong Khai corridor, where the securely dated sites lie west of the Phu Phan Range, and read them as a frontier network of Fa Ngum's reign running along the Phetchabun and Phu Phan corridors. A frontier on those corridors would leave much of the central plateau outside Lan Xang's initial network, against the chronicle identifications that place many conquered mueang around Phimai. Most inscriptions from the region date only from the later Vientiane period, so the two reconstructions remain unreconciled. At the same time, the southern and southeastern margins of the plateau continued to be inhabited by Kuy communities, whose presence predates the historically documented Kuy chiefdoms of the 18th century. Some Thai scholarship further proposes the existence of a Kuy polity centred on Tbong Khmum between the 14th and 16th centuries, although this reconstruction relies primarily on later chronicle traditions and has yet to be corroborated by archaeological or epigraphic evidence. Beyond the plateau, southern Laos and northeastern Cambodia likewise remained divided among small riverine polities centred on Champasak, Salavan, and Attapeu. According to interpretations of the accounts of Fa Ngum's campaigns, these areas were incorporated into Lan Xang during his conquests, although archaeological evidence for the immediately pre-Lan Xang period remains limited.

Following Fa Ngum's campaigns, Lao and Siamese chronicles describe a frontier settlement between Lan Xang and Ayutthaya, accompanied by a royal marriage alliance between Fa Ngum and an Ayutthayan princess.

Settlement pattern

Work on the palaeo-shoreline has moved the sea's retreat earlier than had been thought. Baker and Pasuk take this to withdraw the long-held view that the lower gulf still lay over the plain in the first millennium, and that many Dvaravati towns then stood on the coast.

Archaeological survey has identified 107 Dvaravati-associated urban sites in present-day Thailand, most of them in the central plain. The largest settlements were located at Nakhon Pathom, Suphanburi, and Phraek Si Racha, with secondary centers at U Thong, Chansen, Khu Bua, Pong Tuek, Mueang Phra Rot, Lopburi, Si Mahosot, Kamphaeng Saen, Dong Lakhon, U-Taphao, Ban Khu Mueang, and Si Thep.

The towns took more than one form. U Thong was laid out in a bow of a river in the shape of a conch shell, a plan repeated at Mueang Phra Rot and Si Mahosot, each of which had a penumbra of satellite settlements. Nakhon Pathom, the largest, had a moat, canals running through the town and more than a hundred buildings on brick bases, and its major religious monuments stood outside the wall, which has been read as a division between town-dwelling and forest-dwelling monks.

Karen Mudar's locational study of 63 moated settlements mapped from aerial photographs sorted them into four administrative levels by size and position: Nakhon Pathom alone at the top, seven regional centres, fifteen district centres and thirty-four smaller sites. Thiessen polygons drawn around the regional centres gave seven territories of roughly equal extent, averaging some 3,300 km² and holding between seven and fourteen moated settlements each, with the centres about 75 km apart. Size and rank did not coincide: only five of the ten largest sites came out as regional centres. Mudar took a moat as evidence that a settlement could mobilise labour for public works and so held some supervisory function, and noted that her rankings rest on a single variable and would shift if ramparts and public buildings were recorded systematically.

The settlements' rank-size distribution falls close to a straight line, which she read as a single integrated economic system by the end of the period, Nakhon Pathom neither suppressing the growth of other centres nor drawing on resources from a larger system outside. On the political form she declined to choose: the same data fit a single state-level polity, a set of competing states, or non-state formations such as complex chiefdoms, and all three may have operated around the bay at different times. The seven territories equally satisfy Renfrew's definition of peer polities, being similar in size and sharing writing, belief, language and institutions.

East of the bay, Patcharaporn Ngernkerd and colleagues sorted fifteen moated sites between Prachin Buri and Trat into three ranks. They equate the three with Mudar's regional, district and sub-district levels. Four central towns of 1.06 to 2.41 km², at Si Mahosot, Mueang Phra Rot in Chon Buri, Mueang Phaniet in Chanthaburi and Mueang Phai in Sa Kaeo, head three towns and eight villages. Site density peaks at Si Mahosot and rises again around Mueang Phai, with a thinly settled belt between them. They read that belt, rather than any line, as the boundary between the Dvaravati and Khmer spheres, and place it further west from the early 11th century.

Settlement-pattern work on the upper Chi–Mun basins before the 14th century likewise gives multiple interconnected kingdoms linked by trade and organised around supra-regional centres such as Dong Mueang Aem, Phimai, Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang, Mueang Sema, Non Mueang and Si Thep, a pattern comparable to the Menam valley. A 2015 analysis of pre-600 CE circular moated settlements in the Mun valley found five clusters: the small westernmost group on Mueang Sema; the larger Phimai group east of it; the Phayakkhaphum Phisai–Nadun–Kaset Wisai group on the northern Mun watershed, including Champasri, identified with the Zhū Jiāng Kingdom or the later Zhān Bó; the Buriram–Surin group to the south; and an easternmost group along the Mun–Chi watershed, densest in Suwannaphum, Phon Sai and Nong Hi in present-day Roi Et province.

The following shows the polities under Dvaravati culture in the Menam and the Chi-Mun Valleys during the first millennium.

Dvaravati Kingdoms and others in the lower Menam and upper Mun–Chi Valleys during first millennium

	Seat/Cluster	Level	Settlem	Identified as
	Menam Basin
	Nakhon Pathom	Supra-regional center	8	Kamalanka (Sambuka; 6th-c. Dvaravati)
	Si Thep	Supra-regional center		Qiān Zhī Fú
	Suphanburi	Regional center	9	She Ba Ruo (舍跋若) aka. Santanaha?
	Uthong	District center		Chin Lin (Proto-Dvaravati)
	Phraek Si Racha	Regional center	12/30	Duō Miè (Proto-Dvaravati)
	Lopburi	Regional center	14	Tou Yuan (Proto-Dvaravati)/Lavo
	Si Mahosot	Regional center		Avadhyapura (6th-c. Dvaravati)
	Khao Laem, Uthai Thani	Regional center	6	Bō Cì? (Proto-Dvaravati)
	Tha Tako, Nakhon Sawan	District center	8	Part of Qiān Zhī Fú?
	Utapao, Saraburi	Sub-district center	4	Part of Lavo
	Chaliang	Sub-district center	4	Mueang Chaliang
	Yommarad	Sub-district center	3	Part of Qiān Zhī Fú?
	Tri Trueng/Khlong Mueang	Sub-district center	3	Kosambi
	Upper Pasak valley			Cān Bàn?
	Mun–Chi Basins
	Dong Mueang Aem	Supra-regional center		Unknown
	Phimai	Supra-regional center	103	Mahidharapura (Vimayapura)
	Phon			Pó Àn (婆岸)
Dvaravati kingdoms in the Menam Valley.	Mueang Sema	Regional center	4	Canasapura (8th-c. Dvaravati)
	Champasri	Regional center	69	Zhū Jiāng?, or Zhān Bó/ Yamanadvipa, Vassal of Wen Dan or Bhavapura
	Phayakkhaphum Phisai– Nadun–Kaset Wisai
	Fa Daet Song Yang	District center		Wen Dan or Bhavapura
	Kantharawichai	District center
	Non Mueang	Sub-district center	10	Part of Bhavapura? or Wen Dan?
	Buriram–Surin		57	Part of Vimayapura?/Mahidharapura?
	Suwannaphum–Nong Hi		39	Part of Bhavapura?
Dvaravati polities in the upper Chi River Basin	Songkhram–Mekhong Basins
	Nakhon Phanom/Thakhek			Changzhou of the Tang, Na Lao/Later Gotapura
	Sakon Nakhon			Changzhou of the Tang, Later Mahidharapura?
	Phu Phrabat/Vientiane			Dàomíng, Dōu Hē Lú (都訶盧)?
	Savannakhet			Gān Bì? (甘毕)
	Dvaravati-influenced kingdoms with uncertain identification
	Keoi Lau Mì Tanling
Clusters of 7th-c. moated sites in Mun Valley	Legend:  Capital  500+ ha  300+ ha  101–299 ha  47–100 ha  1–46 ha

Government

Little is known of Dvaravati's administrative structure. It appears to have worked not as a centralized state but as a loose aggregation of chiefdoms reaching from the coast of the upper Malay Peninsula into the riverine plains of the Chao Phraya. Chinese sources from the Tang dynasty describe the polity they enter as Touhe, identified with Dvaravati, as divided into three administrative tiers, commonly rendered as prefectures, counties, and districts. Each city is described as having a citadel and enclosing city walls. The equation of Touhe with Dvaravati is disputed. Baker and Pasuk, following Tatsurō Yamamoto, hold it more likely that Touhe lay in the archipelago. In the early 7th century, the Tongdian notes that the polity had six markets or trading centres, which modern scholars commonly identify with Nakhon Pathom, Chansen, U Thong, Khu Bua, Si Mahosot, and Dong Lakhon, while alternative identifications proposed by other scholars include Lopburi and Pong Tuek. They also record numerous officials, military and civil, overseeing state affairs, and give Dvaravati two vassals: Tou Yuan (陀垣), taken for a predecessor of Lavo, and the island polity of Tanling (曇陵), tentatively placed on an island or small peninsula in the marshlands of the early historic Bay of Bangkok.

The ruler is said to have governed several cities indirectly, his walled enclosure holding only the palace and the offices with some ten thousand households outside it, the inhabitants paying no taxes and living by farming and trade; he is named Touheluo, given name Puyeqiyao. The Tongdian has the fuller notice under Touhe (投和), a polity known since the Sui dynasty, south of Zhenla and a hundred days under sail from Guangzhou. It gives the ruler's surname as Touhe and his personal name as Pu xie qi yao, has him rule a number of cities, and reports from local elders an earlier king, Qizhangmo, who bore no surname. Both are counted among the rulers seated at Kamalanka's Nakhon Pathom, and the last recorded Touhe embassy, that of 649, is credited to Pu-xie-qi-yao. The king wore a gold crown, gold earrings and jewelled leather shoes and lived in a gilded hall likened to a Buddhist stupa opening east; an embassy of the Zhenguan era carried a letter on gold leaf with several dozen kinds of local produce.

The same account matches the three tiers to offices. Affairs of state were directed by a Chaoqing jiangjun (朝請將軍), with Canjun (參軍), Gongcao (功曹), Chengju (城局) and Jinwei jiangjun (金威將軍) handling civil and military business between them. A province (州) was headed by the Canjun, a prefecture (郡) by the Jinwei jiangjun and a county (縣) by the Chengju, each new officeholder choosing his own subordinates. Punishment was graded: death for theft at its gravest, piercing of the ear and temple for lesser offences, severing of the wrist for counterfeiting. No fixed tax rate is recorded, contributions being made according to means without a stated ceiling. Horses numbered fewer than a thousand in the whole territory, and both horses and elephants were ridden.

Baker and Pasuk argue that the material record implies weaker royal authority than the Chinese notice. Inscriptions are few beside the Khmer corpus of the same centuries, and most are in the vernacular. A large share were commissioned by commoners, so writing was no royal monopoly. The coins and medallions carry religious and prosperity emblems rather than royal ones, among them the conch, the pot of plenty and above all the śrīvatsa. The largest sculptural undertaking known from the period, the carved laterite wall of a water tank at Si Mahosot, shows animals and not gods or kings. They read the Indic titles taken by local rulers as more pretension than reality, and follow Srisakra Vallibhotama in supposing several loose confederations along different river courses.

People

Dvāravatī culture is conventionally tied to Mon-speaking communities, but most scholars take its population to have been ethnically and linguistically mixed. Skilling argues that the principalities included several cultural groups, including people of Malay and Khmer background alongside Mon speakers, rather than forming a homogeneous "Mon" polity, while Charles Keyes cautions that such conventional labels can be misleading when applied uniformly to a region this diverse. The donative and dedicatory inscriptions carry the same point, being written in Old Mon, Old Khmer, Sanskrit and Pāli, sometimes two or more within one text, which points to several linguistic communities in the same urban centres. Hunter Watson, who has registered more than a hundred Old Mon inscriptions in Thailand, adds that the sites most central to Dvāravatī have yielded very few of them — one from Nakhon Pathom, a single inscribed clay tablet from U Thong, and one cave inscription near Khu Bua, in contrast to the lengthy Old Khmer corpus — and concludes that Old Mon may have been the language of the ruling class or of the monastic community rather than the general vernacular. A caution of the same kind has been entered against a specific ethnic attribution in the northeast: Hiram Woodward, who accepts Tatsuo Hoshino's placement of Wen Dan's two capitals in the Chi basin, regards Hoshino's further claim that the people of Wen Dan spoke a Tai language as tendentious, and holds that it should be used neither to support nor to invalidate the geographical argument.

Direct physical evidence is limited, human remains having rarely been the object of excavation at Dvāravatī sites, partly because cremation was long assumed to have come with Buddhism and Brahmanism. Inhumation burials beside ritual architecture have challenged that assumption, above all the thirteen or more excavated at Pong Tuek in Kanchanaburi province, one of the sites from which George Cœdès and H. G. Quaritch Wales defined the "Dvāravatī" horizon in the 1920s and 1930s.

Chinese observation supports the prominence of cremation without excluding other rites. The Tongdian reports that the dead were burnt and the ashes gathered into a glass jar which was then released into a river, and that children shaved their heads in mourning for a parent. It further describes dwellings roofed with tile and raised above the ground, with painted interior walls, and records the existence of schools and of a script unlike the Chinese one.

How those burials have been read shows the same uncertainty. A curator at the Royal College of Surgeons Museum in London first described three crania sent there by Quaritch Wales as resembling comparative "Siamese" specimens, with similar dental filing, which Quaritch Wales took for evidence of an early Tai presence. Decades later the same curator explained that the comparison meant only a shared Thai provenance and not ethnic affinity, the remains being as plausibly Malay from Siam; the crania were destroyed in a wartime bombing raid before they could be re-examined. The sparse grave goods from Pong Tuek closely match those beside ritual structures at Dong Mae Nang Mueang (ดงแม่นางเมือง) in Nakhon Sawan province and Wat Chom Chuen (วัดชมชื่น) in Sukhothai province, which some read as deliberate modesty in burial rather than an ethnic marker.

With confirmed Dvāravatī skeletal remains scarce, the population has been discussed chiefly through historical linguistics and, lately, population genetics. The Nyah Kur language is held to descend directly from the Old Mon of the inscriptions, which makes Nyah Kur communities probable descendants of part of the Dvāravatī population; the Mon of present-day Thailand come from later migrations out of Myanmar between the 16th and 19th centuries and are maternally distinct from them in mitochondrial DNA. Genome-wide studies of Austroasiatic speakers on the mainland find that groups linguistically linked to Dvāravatī, the Nyah Kur among them, carry local Austroasiatic, East Asian and South Asian ancestry, with one episode of South Asian admixture dated to roughly 800–1,200 years ago, overlapping the Dvāravatī and early Angkorian periods. No ancient DNA has yet been recovered from a securely identified Dvāravatī burial, so these reconstructions remain indirect. Ancient DNA from an earlier period reaches the same living population from another direction: skeletons from sites of the upper Mun basin dated between 1500 and 500 BCE have their closest living match in the Chao Bon or Nyah Kur.

Religion

Inscriptions found at Pathom stupa in the ancient Nakhon Pathom, stating the Ye Dhammā formula, written with the Grantha script.

Both Buddhism and Hinduism were practised in the Dvāravatī sphere. Since most surviving inscriptions are in Pāli rather than Sanskrit, scholars generally take a Theravāda-affiliated Buddhism to have predominated, coexisting with Brahmanical traditions and local spirit beliefs rather than displacing them, though the sectarian affiliation of individual communities is hard to fix from archaeology alone. Baker and Pasuk press the difficulty further, holding that the vocabulary of sectarian affiliation, Theravada among its terms, is a modern coinage, and noting both images of Avalokiteśvara and Prajñāpāramitā that present usage would class as Mahāyāna and the report of the Chinese monk Yijing that Hinayana and Mahayana approaches were practised in a mixed way in the region. Several scholars hold that the ruling elite was chiefly Brahmanical. John Guy notes both Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava imagery at U Thong, and that the mid-seventh-century copper plate of Śrī Harṣavarman records the gift of a kośa, a precious-metal sheath for a Śiva liṅga. Large-scale stone sculpture implies substantial Brahmanical shrines of which little survives beyond foundation traces, including the standing Gaṇeśa and Viṣṇu images from Si Mahosot and the Si Thep Viṣṇu, while moulded clay figures of Gaja-Lakṣmī, Hāritī and Kubera, deities associated with wealth and attractive to merchant communities, are recorded most prolifically from Lopburi, Suphan Buri and Nakhon Sawan. Wesley Clarke argues that this part of the record was systematically under-reported: Hindu objects have been illustrated among the early historic remains of Siam since the late nineteenth century but left out of discussion since. He instances a pedestal excavated at Pong Tuek in 1927 whose form indicates Śaivite practice but whose implications went unacknowledged, and a Viṣṇu image found at the same site in the 1950s that went effectively undiscussed for sixty years. That image, a standing four-armed Viṣṇu about 80 cm in height wearing a tiered mitre, was subsequently studied in detail by Paul Lavy and Clarke, who assign it to the late 7th or, more probably, the early 8th century. They record two further Brahmanical items in its neighbourhood, a large stone pedestal of yonī or snānadroṇī form at the Pong Tuek locality of Ban Nai Ma, published in plan and photograph by Cœdès but barely discussed by him, and a fragmentary Śiva of the 7th or 8th century from Wat Khao Luea in Ratchaburi province, less than 60 km to the south. On this evidence they argue that the opposition between Buddhist and Brahmanical sites is itself misleading.

Buddhist life centred on merit (Pali: puñña; Sanskrit: puṇya), accumulated by almsgiving, sponsoring Buddha images and endowing monasteries. The 7th-century Chinese pilgrim Yijing recorded that people on the mainland venerated the Three Jewels and that resident monks kept alms rounds and other ascetic observances (dhutaṅga). Donative inscriptions in Mon, Khmer and Sanskrit, commissioned by rulers, local elites and ordinary laypeople, record gifts of land, cattle and labourers to the saṅgha, usually with the donor's hope that the merit would bring Buddhahood or a favourable rebirth for himself and others.

Pāli passages tied to the enlightenment and the first sermon, among them the Four Noble Truths, Dependent Origination (paṭicca-samuppāda) and the widely distributed ye dhammā stanza, were inscribed on stone wheels (dharmacakras), pillars, clay tablets and Buddha images across the sphere. The spread suggests these texts were in active use in practice and teaching rather than symbolic or decorative.

Trade and economy

The urban centres rested on a twin base of intensive wet-rice agriculture on alluvial soils and riverine access to long-distance exchange, Nakhon Pathom and U Thong both being served by the Tha Chin River and so by the Gulf of Thailand.

Mudar estimated what that base could support. Taking the lowest recorded Central Plain yield for broadcast rice and a 2 km limit on the distance farmers will walk to their fields, she calculated that a self-sustaining community could reach about 10 ha, or about 70 ha where rice was transplanted rather than broadcast; anything larger drew part of its food from other settlements, which is the basis of her argument that the moated sites held administrative functions. The largest non-moated site in her Lopburi survey is 12 ha, close to the size at which the moated settlements' distribution falls away. She presented the calculation as a test to be refined rather than a measurement, its figures resting on assumed densities of 100 people per hectare, 85 per cent of each enclosure given over to housing and 58 per cent of the population adult. Comparing each regional centre with the combined area of the moated sites in its territory gives a ratio of about 1:1 west and north of the bay against 1:2 to 1:4 on the east, which she suggested reflected different ways of raising grain: transplanted rice in small fields near the western towns, easier to supervise, against broadcast rice in larger fields further out in the east, more efficiently gathered after harvest.

The excavation between 2013 and 2015 of the Phanom Surin shipwreck in the Tha Chin delta, a stitched-plank vessel of the Arab dhow tradition dated to the late eighth or early ninth century, provided the first direct evidence of West Asian shipping in the region. It yielded the first Persian Gulf torpedo jars recorded in Southeast Asian archaeology, one inscribed in Pahlavi with a personal name of a form indicating a Zoroastrian owner. Persian Gulf turquoise-glazed earthenware has been reported from U Thong, Si Mahosot and Angkor, and figures identified as West Asian merchants appear in the terracotta decoration at Khu Bua and on an incised brick from the Chula Pathon stūpa.

Indian merchants knew mainland and peninsular Southeast Asia as Suvarṇabhūmi, and gold appears in the record from about 400 BCE, alongside iron and glass working. A goldsmith's touchstone from Khlong Thom in Krabi province, inscribed in third- or fourth-century Tamil-Brāhmī as the stone of a great goldsmith, shows Indian craftsmen working in the region. Silver coinage circulated alongside the inscribed medallions: Pyu rising-sun coins current from the fifth to ninth centuries were recovered in an earthenware jar at Khok Chang Din in 1966, and whether such coins served as currency, as bullion and royal gifts, or as consecration deposits is disputed.

Art

Main article: Dvaravati art

Dvaravati itself was heavily influenced by Indian culture, and played an important role in introducing Buddhism and particularly Buddhist art to the region. Stucco motifs on the religious monuments include garudas, makaras, and Nāgas. Additionally, groups of musicians have been portrayed with their instruments, prisoners, females with their attendants, soldiers indicative of social life. Votive tablets have also been found, also moulds for tin amulets, pottery, terracotta trays, and a bronze chandelier, earrings, bells and cymbals.

• 
  White stone Buddha image, attributed to the Dvaravati period, now in Bangkok National Museum
• 
  Dvaravati stone jar, Phra Pathom Chedi National Museum
• 
  Dvaravati bas-relief at the rear base of Phra Sri Sakyamuni, the main Buddha image in the Wihan Luang of Wat Suthat, Bangkok.
• 
  Ku Bua stucco relief, 650–700 C.E., depicts three musicians on the right who are playing (from center) a 5-stringed lute, cymbals, a tube zither or bar zither with a gourd resonator.
• 
  Dvaravati Gold plaque with Standing Buddha, dated 8th–9th century.

Historiography

The main elements of the Dvaravati concept were assembled before any site attributed to it had been systematically excavated. Lucien Fournereau proposed a Buddhist kingdom of the name in 1895. Paul Pelliot argued in 1904, on little direct evidence, that its inhabitants were Mon. Prince Damrong Rajanubhab applied "Dvāravatī period" to a phase of Buddhist art in 1926 and George Cœdès promoted "Art of Dvāravatī" in 1928, though Cœdès first excavated such a site, Pong Tuek, only in 1927. Both he and H. G. Quaritch Wales, who excavated Pong Tuek in 1936 for the Greater-India Research Committee, worked from a "Greater India" view stressing the transfer of elite structures from South Asia, Quaritch Wales calling the zone a case of "extreme acculturation" producing a "purely colonial imitative culture".

Wesley Clarke has argued that this top-down framing required local data to be fitted to broad-scale observations and that inconsistent evidence was minimised, and suggests that at the present level of documentation Dvaravati may be best treated, in the phrase of John Miksic and Goh Geok Yian, as an "archaeological complex" of uncertain social structure and political reach. On terminology, Piriya Krairiksh proposed in 1977 that "Dvāravatī style" be replaced by "Mon style" or, failing that, by classification by find-site; Skilling accepts much of the criticism but regards the substitution of one blanket term for another as unsatisfactory, arguing that the sense intended must be stated explicitly in each case, and has said that he does not accept "the Dvāravatī writ large of previous scholarship", preferring to describe clusters of states with shifting alliances. Mudar pressed the objection in the other direction, arguing that terms such as mandala, muang and ban, whatever they capture of local practice, leave archaeologists unable to compare the region with anywhere else and sustain the impression that Southeast Asian state formation cannot be treated by general models.

Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit press the point from the size of the record. The documentary basis for Dvaravati as a polity is a handful of notices. A traveller from Annam took the robe at To-lo-po-ti early in the 7th century, and Xuanzang and Yijing heard of a country between Sri Ksetra and Isanapura without going there. Under that name three tribute missions reached the Tang court, in 638, 640 and 649. Art historians then made "Dvaravati" the label for a body of styles, and for the period in which they flourished. Stretched that far across space and time, the name carried its political sense with it. Baker and Pasuk hold that the styles spread with trade rather than with political authority, and that Dvaravati was one city-state among many with a short run of Chinese notices.

Walailak Songsiri objects on the same ground to the identification of Dvaravati with Lavo, holding that the name covers the whole set of polities of the plain and that no single town can stand for it. She also notes that Cœdès had withdrawn part of the framework himself. In the study he published with Jean Boisselier in 1965, translated into Thai by Subhadradis Diskul, he no longer derived Suryavarman I from Nakhon Si Thammarat and treated Lopburi art as descended from Dvaravati work rather than imported from Cambodia. She cites Manit Vallibhotama for the earlier proposal having rested on the Tamnan Mulasasana, the Jinakalamali and the Cāmadevivaṃsa.

Rulers

Silver coins of the 7th century from several sites carry Sanskrit inscriptions in Pallava script naming a king and a queen: śrīdvaravatīsvarapuṇya, "King Śrī Dvāravatīśvara, endowed with great merit", and śrīdvaravatīsvaradevīpuṇya, "the goddess-consort of the meritorious king of Dvāravatī". A copper plate of the 6th to mid-7th century from Mueang Uthong names a ruler Harṣavarman, grandson of Isanavarman. Jean Boisselier regarded this figure as a king of Dvaravati, whereas George Cœdès suggested that the plate may have originated in the Khmer realm and that the name could refer to a Khmer ruler. That reading runs into chronology and genealogy: Harshavarman I of the Khmer Empire reigned much later, from 910 to 923, and his grandfather was Indravarman I, not the Īśānavarman of the inscription. Michael Vickery proposed instead a separate line descending from Isanavarman I (r. 616–637), who also married into Cham royalty to the east, another of his grandsons, Prakāśadharma, taking the Cham throne at Mỹ Sơn in 658. His hypothesis has been read as supporting a local fable in which a king of Isanapura made peace with Shridravya of Nakhon Pathom and gave him his daughter in marriage. More recently, palaeographic analysis of the same copper plate by Kangwon Katchima, followed by Anurak Depimai, has dated its script to around the 8th–9th century, considerably later than the Boisselier and Cœdès readings, which would place this Harshavarman's reign roughly a century after Isanavarman I's death; on this view the plate's description of him as Isanavarman's "grandson" (nadda) more plausibly denotes dynastic succession than a literal one-generation descent, and he may have ruled U Thong as one of several Dvaravati capitals of the period.

A further inscription, on the base of a standing Buddha image found at Wat Phra Sri Ratana Mahathat in Lopburi (K.577) and dated to about the 8th–9th century, records that the donor Arushva, chief of the people of Tangura, was the son of the king of Sambuka, a title implying a reigning line at that centre. The identification of Sambuka with Nakhon Pathom is made by several scholars, but no identification has been proposed between this unnamed king and any ruler known from the chronicles.

The Ban Wang Pai inscription from Phetchabun Province (K. 978), dated 550 CE, records the enthronement of a Dvaravati ruler described as a son of Prathivindravarman, the father of Bhavavarman I of Chenla, and so a dynastic tie between the two; his own name is not preserved. Some scholars argue on palaeographic and stylistic grounds that its Bhavavarman is not Bhavavarman I of Chenla. The Nern Phra Ngam inscription from Nakhon Pathom Province, of the mid-5th to mid-6th century, names another ruler whose name is likewise lost.

The table below reconstructs the rulers and political centres of the Dvaravati sphere between the 5th and 14th centuries. Their seats shifted repeatedly across the period.

Color legend for the seat of the polity

PR Phraek Si Racha PS Phitsanulok PE Phetchaburi SI Si Thep

CN Chai Nat SB Sing Buri ST Sukhothai KP Kamphaeng Phet

UT Mueang Uthong JS Jayasiṃhapurī AY Ayodhya SM Si Mahosot

LB Lopburi SH Suphan Buri NP Nakhon Pathom

Reign	Ruler	Seat		Seat	Ruler	Reign		Seat	Ruler	Reign		Seat	Ruler	Reign
Early 7th-c.	Father of Harshavarman?	UT						KP	Chaiyasiri	444–457
Late 7th-c.	Harshavarman	UT
8th-c.	Maratha	UT		SH	As Shě Bá Ruò	6th-c.
				SH	Under Lavo	7th–8th-c.		NP	Doṇabrāhmaṇa	?–569 or '90		SI	Unknown	550–?
fl. 643–651	Chá-shīlì	SM		SH	Under Nakhon Pathom	8th–9th-c.		NP	Kakabhadra?	569–641		SI	Siddhijaya?	569–590?
								NP	Siddhijaya	fl. 590–616/41		SI	Chakravantin	Late 6th–7th c.
629?–647	Navaratna	LB		PR	Queen Indaprastha			NP	Kalavarnadisharaja	641–648		SI	Prathivindravarman	Early 7th c.
648–700	Kalavarnadisharaja	LB		PR	Māgha Shili	6th–7th c.		NP	Cakranarayana	c. 648
				PR	Mórú Shīlì	c. 661		NP	Qi zhang mo	c. 648–649		SI	Bhavavarman	Mid-7th c.
								NP	Pu xie qi yao	c. 649–656		SI	Pú jiā yuè mó	fl. 656–665
				PR	Gomerāja	Late 7th– early 8th c.		NP	Pú jiā yuè mó	fl. 656–665		SI	Rajadhiraj	665–?
								NP	Anuruddha	665?–688?		SI	Manohanaraj	Late 7th-c.
												SI	Under Nakhon Pathom	?–688?
								NP	Sai Thong Som	688–?		SI	Unknown (Under Lavo?)	688–720s
700–?	Balipatijaya	LB						NP	Unknown	?–757
Mid 8th-c.	Nāyaka Ārjava	LB		PR	Ketumāla	?–757						SI	Under Wen Dan	720s–?
?–800?	Under Phraek	LB		PR	Padumasuriyavamsa	757–800		NP	Under Phraek?	757–800		SI	Under Phraek?	?–800
800?–861	Unknown	LB		PR	Padum Kumara	800–?		NP	Sikaraj	?–807		SI	Adītaraj	800–859?
				PR	Phrom	22 years		NP	Kamsa	807–867
				PR	Son of Phrom	mid 9th-c.
				PR	Pakshi Jam Krong?	mid 9th-c.
861–?	Vasudeva (Under Kamphaeng Phet?)	LB		PR	Senakarāja	mid 9th-c.
	Son of the ruler of Kamphaeng Phet	LB		PR	Under Kamphaeng Phet?	late 9th-c.		NP	Balaraj	867–913		SI	Bhagadatta	859–?
				PR	Bharattakabba	?–892
?–927	Uchitthaka	LB		PR	Sai Nam Peung	892–922						SI	Sundaraprakrama	Early 10th-c.
927–940s	Under Tambralinga	LB		PR	Sudhammaraja	922–937		NP	Under Ratchaburi	913–927?		SI	Sundararavarman	?–937
				PS		937–957		NP	Under Tambralinga	927–940s		SI	Narapatisimhavarman	937–949
				PR	Sindhob Amarin	937–996		NP	Unknown	940s–1058		SI	Under Angkor	949–?
957–987	Visnuraja	PS		PR	Sundaradeśanā	996–?		SH	Pansa	916–930s		LB	Under Phraek Si Racha	940s–1000s
987–?	Vijayaraja	PS		PR	Under Lavo	?–1005		UT		930s–1006		LB	Sundaradeśanā	?–1005
?–1027		PE		PR	Under Angkor	1005–1052		UT	Ramapandita	1006–1046		LB	Under Angkor	1005–1052
1027–1050s	Srisimha	PE
1050s–1062		PR						UT	Anga Indra	1046–1081		LB	Chandrachota	1052–1069
1062–1080s	Surindraraja	PR		JS	8 monarchs Rāmeśvara Baramaraja Mahācakravartin Bodhisāra (?–990s) Ekarāja (new dynasty) Baramatiloka Śrībhūparāja Jatiraja	Early 10th-c. –1169						LB	Regent	1069–1082
1080s–1100		CN						UT	Kar Tayy (Under Pagan?)	1081–1100s		LB	Narai I	1082–?
												LB	Unknown	?–1106
				PR	Sri Dharmasokaraja I (Under Pagan?)	1080s–1117		SH		1100s–1121		LB	Kesariraja	1106–1110s
1100–1132	Suryavamsa	CN										LB	Under Phraek Si Racha	1110s–1117
1132–1167	Anuraja	CN		AY	Narai I	1080s–1087		SH	Vacant	1121–1163		LB	Under Angkor	1117–1150
		SB		AY	Phra Chao Luang	1087–1111						LB	Phanom Thale Sri	1150–1156
1167–1180	Under Lavo	PR		AY	Sai Nam Peung	1111–1165						LB	Sri Dharmasokaraja II	1157–1180
1156–1157	Phanom Thale Sri	ST
1169–1188		JS		AY	Dhammikaraja	1165–1205		SH	Uthong I	1163–1205		LB	Under Angkor	1180–1218
1188–1205		PE										LB	Unknown	1218–?
1205–1289	Thonglanrach	PE		SH	Vacant	1205–1220s		JS		1188–1205		PR	Fang-hui-chih	1180–1204
				SH	Saenpom	1220s–?		AY	Uthong II	1205–1253		PR	Mahidharavarman	1204–1205
								AY	Jayasena	1253–1289		PR	Ai (Under Ayodhya)	1205–1249
1289–?	Jayasena	PE		SH	Uthong III	?–1335		AY	Suvarnaraja	1289–1301		PR	Vacant (Under Ayodhya)	1249–1279
								AY	Dhammaraja	1301–1310		PR	Vacant (Under Sukhothai)	1279–1299
?–1342	Sam	PE		SH	Uthong IV	1335–1341		AY	Baramaraja	1310–1344		PR	Śiricandrarāja	1299–14th-c.
1342–1351	Uthong V	PE		SH	Uthong V	1341–1351		AY	Uthong V	1344–1369		LB	Under Phraek Si Racha	?–1319
Phetchaburi was merged into Ayutthaya since 1351.				Suphannaphum was under Ayutthaya since 1351.				Formation of Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1351.				LB	Maternal grandfather of Ramesuan	1319–1351?
												LB	Ramesuan	1351–1388
												LB	Merged into Ayutthaya since 1388

Further reading

• Robert L. Brown, The Dvaravati Wheels of the Law and the Indianization of South East Asia. Studies in Asian Art and Archaeology, Vol. 18, Fontein, Jan, ed. Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1996.
• Elizabeth Lyons, "Dvaravati, a Consideration of its Formative Period", R. B. Smith and W. Watson (eds.), Early South East Asia: Essays in Archaeology, History and Historical Geography, Oxford University Press, New York, 1979, pp. 352–359.
• Dhida Saraya, (Sri) Dvaravati: the Initial Phase of Siam's History, Bangkok, Muang Boran, 1999, ISBN 974-7381-34-6
• Swearer, Donald K. and Sommai Premchit. The Legend of Queen Cama: Bodhiramsi's Camadevivamsa, a Translation and Commentary. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. ISBN 0-7914-3776-0
• สุรพล ดำริห์กุล, ประวัติศาสตร์และศิลปะหริภุญไชย, กรุงเทพฯ: สำนักพิมพ์เมืองโบราณ, 2004, ISBN 974-7383-61-6.
• Pierre Dupont, The Archaeology of the Mons of Dvāravatī, translated from the French with updates and additional appendices, figures and plans by Joyanto K.Sen, Bangkok, White Lotus Press, 2006.
• Jean Boisselier, "Ū-Thòng et son importance pour l'histoire de Thaïlande [et] Nouvelles données sur l'histoire ancienne de Thaïlande", Bōrānwitthayā rư̄ang MỮang ʻŪ Thō̜ng, Bangkok, Krom Sinlapakon, 2509 [1966], pp. 161–176.
• Peter Skilling, "Dvaravati: Recent Revelations and Research", Dedications to Her Royal Highness Princess Galyani Vadhana Krom Luang Naradhiwas Rajanagarindra on her 80th birthday, Bangkok, The Siam Society, 2003, pp. 87–112.
• Natasha Eilenberg, M.C. Subhadradis Diskul, Robert L. Brown (editors), Living a Life in Accord with Dhamma: Papers in Honor of Professor Jean Boisselier on his Eightieth Birthday, Bangkok, Silpakorn University, 1997.
• C. Landes, "Pièce de l’époque romaine trouvé à U-Thong, Thaïlande", The Silpakorn Journal, vol.26, no.1, 1982, pp. 113–115.
• John Guy, Lost Kingdoms: Hindu Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast, New York and Bangkok, Metropolitan Museum of Art and River Books, 2014, p. 32.
• Wārunī ʻŌsathārom. Mư̄ang Suphan bon sēnthāng kan̄plīanplǣng thāng prawattisāt Phutthasattawat thī 8 – ton Phutthasattawat thī 25 (History, development, and geography of the ancient city of Suphan Buri Province, Central Thailand, 8th–25th B.E.), Samnakphim Mahāwitthayālai Thammasāt, Krung Thēp, 2547.
• Supitchar Jindawattanaphum (2020). "หลักฐานการมีอยู่ของผู้ปกครอง และชนชั้นสูงสัมยทวารวดี" [Evidences of Governors and Aristocrats’ Existences in Dvaravati Period] (PDF) (in Thai). Nakhon Pathom Rajabhat University. Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 April 2024.