Cambodian Royal Chronicles

[4] The study of these texts is said to have been "time-consuming and requires a great deal of scholarship to properly organize and interpret the valuable information to be found within" with respect to the ongoing debate on the reasons and events of the abandonment of Angkor, the shifting of the Khmer capital and the general cultural decline.

[2] Rajabansavatar consists of: raja = “king or royal”; bansa, vamça = “ancestry, lines”; and avatara = “descendant, incarnation”, or savatar is derived from bansavatar or sauvatar which means “history”.

The meaning of rajabansavatar or rapa ksatr can be translated as “annals” or “royal chronicles”, writings which are related to the history of the kings.

1613 (1855) are in the Buddhist Institute library in Phnom Penh; given their extreme fragility people are not allowed to access them as a general rule.

[7] There exist around thirty-four copies of chronicles in Khmer language, along with three texts transcribed in Latin (systeme des missionaires) in the French National Library.

Version 2 - The oldest chronicle, 'The Fragment of Ang Eng', offered to King Rama I dating to 1796, was translated into Thai language, as such it remains in Bangkok.

The copy of 1818 was first translated in French by Ernest Doudart de Lagrée and published by Francis Garnier (Chronique Royale du Cambodge, 1871).

In 1904 Étienne Aymonier published Le Cambodge, another translation of the Chronicles related to studies of Chinese historiography and European authors of the era.

Traduction française avec comparaison des différences version et introduction" and in 1981 fellow scholar Mak Phoeun publishes "Chroniques royales du Cambodige: De 1594 à 1677.

[15] On the other hand, many texts give unusually detailed accounts of controversies and conflicts among the royal families, to the point of explicit evaluation of leadership and blaming weak monarchs for national misfortunes.

[16] Some scholars dismiss these recordings as to be unhistorical - as facts are obviously missing, authors tend to create stories and adopt legends in order to fill gaps.