Old Khmer Inscriptions Reading Sessions, Paris

As part of a weekly EPHE seminar (see https://ephe.fr/formations/conferences/lecture-d-inscription-sanskrite-de-l-asie-du-sud-et-du-sud-est), Prof. Arlo Griffiths, Salomé Pichon (PhD student) and Chloé Chollet (PhD student) are holding reading sessions of Cambodian inscriptions written in Old Khmer every Tuesday from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. These sessions also benefit from comments and parallels with modern Khmer from Prof. Michel Antelme (INALCO) who participates regularly.

 Rock inscription K. 524, photo by Chloé Chollet

Several tasks are carried out during these meetings:

1 – Checking the reading of the inscriptions using rubbings or photographs;

2 – Raising questions of translation on Old Khmer words or particles which have not yet been the subject of in-depth study;

3 – Proposing a new translation into French;

4 – Encoding our readings and translations in EpiDoc-XML.

The selected inscriptions — among the 1500 that make up the corpus of inscriptions from Cambodia — are more particularly linked to the doctoral work of Salomé Pichon and Chloé Chollet, which bring together a wide variety of texts datable from between the 9^th and 13^th centuries CE. They provide information on topics such as land holdings or eremitic tradition, and therefore deal with matters relating to civil, economic and religious life in ancient Cambodia. These reading sessions, in addition to addressing issues on Old Khmer language, are intended to deepen our understanding of still little discussed research topics.