Sukhothai Kingdom: Map & History

History

The traditions disagree about when Sukhothai was founded, and none of them is contemporary. One chronicle tradition places the founding of Sukhothai in 494 CE, followed by its twin city of Chaliang (เชลียง). The Legend of the Arhat (Tamnan Nithan Phra Arahant; ตำนานนิทานพระอรหันต์) instead gives 679 CE and names the founder as Indrajayadhirāja (อินทราไชยธิราช), from the city of Nakhon Luang (นครหลวง, "capital city", possibly Lavapura). He was deposed in 687 by Balidhiraja, elder son of Kalavarnadisharaja of Lavo. Who followed Balidhiraja is obscure in the surviving record.

Economy

The capital stood in drainage country rather than on a floodplain and depended on stored water. The Saritphon dam south-west of the city fed the Sao Ho canal, which carried water through the walls to ponds and wells inside. Earthworks and a three-tier moat slowed the monsoon flood off the western hills. How much the land yielded is disputed. Suparat Ledpanishakun and Dhida Saraya hold that cultivation met local needs and no more, and place the kingdom's wealth in the trade in forest products. Four overland routes carried it, east to the Mekong, north to Luang Prabang, west through Chot in present-day Tak province to Martaban and Pegu, and south to the Gulf.

Society and culture

Wyatt sets Sukhothai in a region he treats as distinct from the rest of the Menam world. He divides the country of the period into three. The west was cosmopolitan and lived by sea trade, and the east was more urbanised and lay within the Angkorian cultural orbit. The north, on the Yom and the Nan, was a frontier where incoming and resident populations mixed. He traces the ancestry of the late-13th-century rulers to families who came down the Nan from the U River valley. The Sukhothai dialect, he notes, stands close to the Phuan of Xiang Khouang. He reads their movement as the working of an ultimogeniture in which elder sons were sent south to find towns of their own while the youngest inherited. They moved into country already held by Mōn and Khmer speakers.

Legacy

The Silajaruek of Sukhothai are hundreds of stone inscriptions that form a historical record of the period. Among the most important inscriptions are the Ram Khamhaeng Inscription (Inscription No. 1) and the Wat Si Chum Inscription, an account of the history of the region and of Sri Lanka. A third is the Wat Pa Mamuang inscription, a politico-religious record of Loe Thai.

Mongkut (Rama IV) is considered the champion of Sukhothai narrative history due to his discovery of Inscription No. 1, the "first evidence" of the history of Sukhothai. Mongkut said that he found a "first stone inscription" in Sukhothai which told of heroic kings such as Ram Khamhaeng, the administrative system, and other developments in what was considered the "prosperous time" of the kingdom.