| Abstract: |
While the rulers of Angkor projected their power to varying degrees throughout central and eastern mainland Southeast Asia, their most significant achievement was creating and maintaining a relatively stable and homogenous territorial core. This heartland, called the land of Kambu or Kambuja, comprised the capital’s outlying network of settlements, temples, and roads and was more or less coextensive with the space of Khmer ethnicity. This chapter reviews the evidence for this Khmer political space in its material culture remains and in the texts of the inscriptions. In the process, it evaluates the ‘nation’ as a relevant category of analysis for Angkor and for its Khmer successor states over the longue durée.
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