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 (), 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. Murphy, following Robert L. Brown, gives the same three.

The term also denotes a wider cultural and artistic sphere rather than a centralized state. Its extent is generally taken to be greater than that of the political entity, and a shared material culture does not by itself imply a single ethnic group. 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 associated with principalities such as Chin Lin and Tun Sun in the western plains alongside Tou Yuan to the east. The phase is usually placed in the 1st to 5th centuries, though Stephen A. Murphy restricts it to the 4th and 5th.

Dvaravati's early political centre is disputed. Proposed centers include Ayojjhapura (Si Thep), Sambuka (Nakhon Pathom), and Avadhyapura (). 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. They include 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.

Name

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.

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"; 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. Michael Vickery cautions that names ending in -īśvara in pre-Angkorian inscriptions are not uniform. Most denote followers of Śiva, a few Viṣṇu, and some carry no more than a general sense of lord or temporal ruler. Revire lists the provinces in which inscribed medallions have turned up as Nakhon Pathom, Ratchaburi, Suphan Buri, Sing Buri, Lop Buri and Chai Nat. Most are chance finds whose exact provenance is unknown, many are in private collections, and forgeries have lately been noticed. 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 name reached China in several forms. The records give Duheluobodi, Duoheluo, Duheluo, Duoluobodi and Tuhuoluo, and describe the place as a country (). They put it between Śrīkṣetra in present-day Myanmar to the west and Īśānapura in Cambodia to the east. Xuanzang and Yijing give Duoluobodi, which Revire suggests may restore as Dvārapati, lord of Dvāra, rather than as Dvāravatī. The name carried weight in India as well. The Yādava kings of Devagiri styled themselves dvāravatīpuravarādhiśvara, overlord of Dvāravatī the best of cities, and Bhillama II called himself supreme lord of the city of Dvāravatī and a scion of the race sprung from Viṣṇu.

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. Claude Jacques drew the opposite conclusion from the same association. In 2009 he proposed Si Thep, on the strength of its early cult of Viṣṇu and of two images of Kṛṣṇa Govardhanadhāra found there, dated to about the late sixth and the late seventh century.

The name was not unique to the plain. Revire discusses two Cambodian donative inscriptions of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries that use it, and doubts they refer to the polity in Thailand. He notes as well that Thandwe in Rakhine is equated with a classical Dvāravatī in early modern Burmese chronicles.

History

Dvaravati culture is marked by moated urban settlements coupled with religious architecture in brick, laterite or both. Major sites include Nakhon Pathom, U Thong in present-day Suphan Buri Province, Si Thep and Khu Bua, as well as and Si Mahosot. Which of them held the political centre is disputed. Nakhon Pathom and U Thong are the two most often proposed, and on Karen Mudar's settlement hierarchy U Thong ranks as a district centre, which tempers earlier arguments that it was the capital.

Three of the medallions were excavated under controlled conditions, at monument 7 of Khok Chang Din in 1997, inside a jar holding uninscribed ritual coins and chopped silver ingots. Two others, in private Thai collections and of uncertain origin, read śrīdvāravatīśvaradevīpuṇya, the meritorious work of the queen of the lord of Dvāravatī. Revire reads puṇya on these pieces as Brahmanical rather than Buddhist Sanskrit, in the older ritual sense of a meritorious work, and takes the lord of Dvāravatī to have counted Hindu and Buddhist foundations alike as merit.

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. Murphy accepts an earlier transitional phase but places it in the 4th and 5th centuries, holding that the sculptural and epigraphic evidence cannot be dated before the 6th and that the main period runs from the 7th to the 9th. Dvaravati culture also spread into Isan and lowland Laos from the sixth century, with major sites at Mueang Fa Daet in Kalasin Province and in Nakhon Ratchasima Province. Ian Glover named the interval between the two bodies of evidence the "Pre-Dvāravatī Gap". Late prehistoric finds 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. 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 the stone says is read three ways. Skilling makes the queen and the daughter one person, where the first published translation made them two. Jacques read the same fragment as devī-[śr]īn and took the image to be the goddess Śrī rather than the Tathāgata, which changes what was installed and not only who installed it. Revire leaves the consequence for ritual practice open, and calls the inscription a seventh-century text. He takes the title pati in the inscription to be equivalent to īśvara elsewhere, comparing the Lopburi inscription K. 577, which names an adhipati Ārjava of the Taṅgur people as son of the īśvara of Śāmbūka. He also notes that the donation of a Buddha image described as a mūrti is rare, the word being the usual one for the Hindu trimūrti. 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

The phase is usually placed in the 1st to 5th centuries, though Murphy restricts it to the 4th and 5th. Its sites lie mainly in the western Menam valleys: the unmoated settlement of (), 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 . 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 label was proposed by Andrew Barram and Ian Glover in 2008 and taken up by Murphy, who argues that the sculpture, architecture and urban planning of Dvaravati are the end of a long process and not its beginning. A period of local development must therefore be posited before them, since the older model of a wholesale arrival of Indian culture is no longer held. He prefers proto-Dvaravati to late prehistory, which implies societies that have not developed out of Iron Age forms, and to early Dvaravati, which implies a culture already formed. He also parts from Barram and Glover, who would redate the Dvaravati assemblage as a whole. On his reading the full range of Dvaravati pottery is not yet present in the earlier phase, kendi, a spouted water vessel, do not appear in central Thailand before the 6th century, and some prehistoric forms persist into the 4th and 5th. The same argument is applied to the polity. The embassy that reached the Tang court in 638 records the first recognition of Dvaravati rather than its beginning, since a polity had to be self-defining and wealthy enough to mount the journey.

Eight excavated sites carry the case. At Chan Sen, Bennet Bronson classified the phase of about 200 to 450 or 500 CE as Funan-related. On the comparative material available since, that material is closer to Dvaravati than to the Mekong delta. Chureekamol Onsuwan Eyre found the sites around Chan Sen unranked by size in 200 BCE to 300 CE, but ranked on two levels by about the 5th century. At Nakhon Pathom the site of Hor-Ek was occupied from the 3rd to the 11th centuries, and its excavators proposed pre- or proto-Dvaravati for its first phase. At U Thong, San Thaiyanonda places the moat and the first Indic contact in the mid-4th century at the latest. Radiocarbon dates from Matthew Gallon's excavations at Kamphaeng Saen put the first occupation in the early 5th century, with substantial Buddhist building only in the 7th and 8th.

At Phromthin Tai near Lopburi and at Kheedkhin in Saraburi the excavators record continuity from late prehistory into the Dvaravati period, but no proto-Dvaravati phase can be separated out in the excavated layers. In the northeast the two largest sites show the same shape. At the 4th- to 5th-century phase is classified as late prehistoric by its excavator, though its pottery continues into the Dvaravati phase and the site has no earlier prehistoric levels at all. At Mueang Fa Daet the excavators recognise a proto-historic period of about the 2nd to 6th centuries.

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. Murphy holds that the ceramics of Nakhon Pathom show trade contact only, not the overlordship earlier scholarship assumed, so that Funan is the wrong period label for the 4th and 5th centuries. The material Bronson and Jean Boisselier called Funanese is closer to Dvaravati material.

The cemetery of in Kanchanaburi province, 25 km south of U Thong and radiocarbon-dated to the late centuries BCE, shows their reach. Excavated from 1975 onwards, it yielded over a thousand iron tools and weapons, more than any other reported prehistoric site in Thailand. With them were 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 () 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

The Tai Yuan Legend of Singhanavati calls the lower Menam Basin before the Dvaravati period Lava-rāṣṭra (; ), 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 subduing several existing settlements, some of them implicitly Lawa. Marriage followed: the third Yonok king, Achutraraj (), 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

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 ( or ), founded Indaprasthanagara, which the Ayutthaya Testimonies place east of Sankhaburi in the Phraek Si Racha region; another, Ngua In (), 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 () with the ruler named Pu-xie-qi-yao (), 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.

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 (), 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 () 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 () of Chinese records, in the Zhenguan period (, 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 was two sent to the king of Linyi in 713. They 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 (), 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 ( or ) in present-day Prakhon Chai district, and several later Siamese monarchs claimed descent from him. The Legend of Mueang Phaya Re () gives the city's revival differently, to King Sudarśana (), 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 () 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 () of Vajraprākārapura (, 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

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 , Charles F. Keyes argued that local traditions, above all the legend of Phadaeng Nang Ai and the Tamnan Fa Daet Song Yang (), 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 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.

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 ( or ). Hoshino has proposed that the early Tai polities of Gǔ Láng Dòng () and Jūn Nà Lú () 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 () and Bó Guo (). Another, Pó Àn () 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 (). 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

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, 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.

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.

Revire warns against dating the plate from one letter form. The short medial vertical of its ka is commonly taken as a marker of post-Pallava script, and so of a date after the seventh and eighth centuries, but the same form occurs in dated seventh-century inscriptions from southern Cambodia, K. 79 of 565 śaka (644 CE) and K. 50 and K. 582 of 589 śaka (667 CE). He treats it as a possible regional variety. He adds that inscribed copper sheets, common in India and Indonesia, are unknown in Cambodia, which bears on the suggestion that the plate reached U Thong from elsewhere. 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 () 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.

Dvaravati–Champa relations

Contact between the Dvāravatī sphere and Champa is attested chiefly through art and architecture. Varis Domethong divides it into two phases with different geographies. Between roughly the sixth and ninth centuries the material found in Thailand clusters in the Tha Chin and Mae Klong basins, at U Thong, ancient Nakhon Pathom and Khu Bua. Si Mahosot in the east is the one outlier. From about the ninth century the western material thins to elephant sculptures at Pong Tuek and Wat Phra Prathon, and the eastern evidence disappears. Comparable work appears instead in the northeast, at Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang and Phra That Phanom. On the Cham side a distribution once running from Quảng Bình to Bình Thuận narrows over the same period to the Quảng Nam sites of Dong Duong, Tra Kieu and My Son. Domethong states that his distribution maps are limited by restricted access to Cham material in Vietnam, and calls the pattern preliminary.

The earlier phase rests on Brahmanical rather than Buddhist material. The gift of a kośa recorded on the U Thong copper plate matches a rite attested in Champa, in the My Son B6 inscription of 687. John Guy holds the object unknown elsewhere in Southeast Asia and uncommon in India. Dvāravatī figures of dancers and musicians have been compared with the carved pedestal of My Son E1.

The later phase is Buddhist and northeastern. At Phra That Phanom the earliest building phase is a square plan on a low base, with corner pilasters cut by a deep central groove and ornament carved into the brick. Some scholars compare it with the Hoa Lai and Dong Duong styles of Champa. Domethong argues for Dong Duong, and so for a date early in the tenth century rather than the ninth, on the transfer of the Cham capital to Indrapura at Dong Duong in 875. He notes that the brick was polished and bonded with dầu rái resin in the Cham manner. Reliefs of an elephant rider and a horseman on the outer wall match carvings on the two Dong Duong pedestals, which Nandana Chutiwongs reads as the assault of Māra.

At Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang the comparison rests on the sema stones and on a lion sculpture. Among northeastern sema only Indra wears the tall cylindrical crown found on Cham images, as on the stone showing Indra and his consort. The seated posture carved on several Fa Daet stones, with one knee raised and one arm reaching down, matches figures in the niches of both Dong Duong pedestals. Stephen A. Murphy has argued that this posture is confined to northeastern Thailand and to central Champa, and reads it as evidence that craftsmen moved between the two. The Fa Daet lion follows a type known from Tra Kieu, though Domethong finds it the cruder of the two and suggests a local hand.

Domethong reads the shift as political as well as artistic. On his account the move north in 875 brought a new Cham dynasty and a turn from Brahmanical religion to Mahāyāna and tantric Buddhism. The new house then sought standing in a region where Buddhism was long established. He treats the exchange of artistic form as the medium of that relationship. He claims no Cham authority over any northeastern centre. Following Phasook Indrawooth's report on the 1991 excavation, he holds that Fa Daet Song Yang had a ruler of its own and was subordinate to no other polity. He reads the Cham material there as cultural relations between neighbouring centres.

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 () 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 () 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 (), placed west of Dvaravati. It has been tentatively identified with Qiān Zhī Fú, partly on its phonological match with Jiā Luó Shě Fú (), which Hoshino centres at Si Thep with 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 () to the later xiān (), 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

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 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 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 () house.

These northern developments met events in the upper Menam valley. The Northern Chronicle has a coalition of Tai Yuan mueang under Śrīdharmatripiṭaka () 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 (), 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 (), 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 (), 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 (), Nong Han Luang (), identified with Sakon Nakhon, and Nong Han Noi () or Khun Khom Nakhon (), 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 (; ), describing it as a paramount centre paired in status with Yothika (), or Kurunta (), 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 () 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 (, in present-day Mueang Maha Sarakham district) and Muang Si Kaeo–Phak Waen (, in modern Changhan district), while his two grandsons were assigned to rule Muang Hong–Muang Thong (, in Chaturaphak Phiman district) and Muang Pheng (, 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 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 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

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 (). 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 .

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 (), Róng Lǐ (), Luó Hú (), and Xún Fān (). 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. They occur in 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 (), 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 (). 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, on 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 () 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 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 () 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 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 (), 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 (), tentatively identified by some scholars as 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 (), 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.

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.

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 (), 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 (), 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 () under Phaya Cantharat became the centre of a small mandala, with the muang of Chiang Song (), Chiang Sa (), Chiang Khua (), Chiang Choi () and Sabut () subordinate to it. This Chiang Som polity also maintained an alliance with Chiang Yun () 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 (), Muang Man (), Muang Kula (), Muang Yuan (), Muang Lao (), Muang Lue (), Muang Khmen (), and Muang Koi Kai (), 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

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 (), 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, those 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 refers to Ayodhya prior to 1351 as Dvāravatī and Śrī Ayodhiyā Dvāravatī Nakhon (). Corroborating evidence appears in Burmese epigraphic sources. A 1768 inscription of Hsinbyushin of Ava (Serial No. 1128), discovered on a bronze cannon 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 (), 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. These were 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 (), the polity ruled by Pho Khun Pha Mueang () in the traditional founding narrative of Sukhothai. Manit Vallibhotama identified it with the moated site of Mueang Kao (Khorakhapura; also called Nakhon Raj)– 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

Distribution

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. Trongjai Hutangkura's reconsideration of the palaeo-shoreline finds that the site inventory of Thiva Supajanya and P. Vanasin overestimated the height of the mean sea level, and that what it mapped as coastline was a floodplain. Mudar's analysis of the moated settlements does not depend on the position of that coastline and is unaffected. The distribution of the moated towns bears on the same question. A survey by Phōngsi Wanasin and Thiwa Supcanya found the ancient settlements of the plain arranged in two rows above the 3.5-metre contour, one running west from Phetchaburi through Ratchaburi to Suphanburi, the other east from Chainat through Inburi, Singburi and Phromburi to Lopburi; Wyatt, who reports the survey, reads the rows as the fringes of a plain then largely under water.

Archaeological survey has identified 107 Dvaravati-associated urban sites in present-day Thailand, most of them in the central plain. Other counts differ with the criteria used. Phasook Indrawooth records over thirty sites and Matthew Gallon almost fifty, while Karen Mudar's study works from sixty-three drawn from Thiva Supajanya and Vanasin's inventory of ancient settlements. Most have not been investigated in detail, and Stephen A. Murphy singles out eight that have seen sustained archaeological research. The largest settlements were located at Nakhon Pathom, Suphanburi, and Phraek Si Racha, with secondary centers at U Thong, Chansen, Khu Bua, , Mueang Phra Rot, Lopburi, Si Mahosot, Kamphaeng Saen, Dong Lakhon, U-Taphao, Ban Khu Mueang, and Si Thep.

Geophysical work and the distribution of the early cities have been read as marking three zones, separated well enough to have worked independently within the economic and political network of the pre-Angkorian period. Earlier proposals divided the area into two, three or four. Revire doubts that any such division holds for religious art and practice.

North of that ground, Stephen Murphy and Pimchanok Pongkasetkan group the sites of Kamphaeng Phet, Phichit, Phitsanulok, Nakhon Sawan and the upper part of Chai Nat as the Upper Chao Phraya basin. It takes in U-Ta Pao in Manorom district, Chai Nat; Khok Mai Den, Muang Bon, Thap Chumpon, Chan Sen and Dong Mae Nang Muang in Nakhon Sawan; and Khao Kalon in Kamphaeng Phet. The main waterways are the lower Ping, the lower Yom and Nan, and the Chao Phraya, which they take to have carried circulation through the area.

Town plans and settlement hierarchy

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 stands alone at the top, above seven regional centres, fifteen district centres and thirty-four smaller sites. Boundaries drawn midway between the regional centres gave seven territories of roughly equal extent, averaging some 3,300 km² and holding seven to 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.

The east and the Khorat Plateau

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 2.41km², 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, , 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. These are 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.

Polities and centres

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

Government

Political form

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.

Murphy puts the same point in terms of state formation. Proto-Dvaravati denotes for him a proto-state, more developed than an Iron Age chiefdom or a kinship-based society but short of the centralized control of economic, social and religious activity by which archaeologists define a state. Reading Mudar's settlement hierarchy, he finds no centralized Dvaravati state before at least the 7th century and probably later, and takes the sites of the 4th to 6th centuries to have interacted while developing largely independently of one another; only from the 7th century do inscriptions naming kings and a settlement hierarchy point towards a more centralized state.

Chinese accounts

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 . They also record numerous officials, military and civil, overseeing state affairs, and give Dvaravati two vassals: Tou Yuan (), taken for a predecessor of Lavo, and the island polity of Tanling (), 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 (), 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 (), with Canjun (), Gongcao (), Chengju () and Jinwei jiangjun () handling civil and military business between them. A province () was headed by the Canjun, a prefecture () by the Jinwei jiangjun and a county () by the Chengju, each new officeholder choosing his own subordinates. Punishment was graded. Death was the penalty for theft at its gravest, the ear and temple were pierced for lesser offences, and the wrist severed 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. Oliver Wolters held that the concept of a state does not work for Dvāravatī, or for the other early political systems of the region. Revire adds that there is often no evidence that the rulers of these polities were responsible for the artistic production attributed to them, still less that they were Buddhists.

People

Language and ethnicity

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. David K. Wyatt, writing in 2001, proposed calling the population of the Central Plain Siamese, expressly not as a synonym for Thai but to convey what he termed an ethnicity in the process of becoming.

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. There is one from Nakhon Pathom, a single inscribed clay tablet from U Thong, and one cave inscription near Khu Bua, against the lengthy Old Khmer corpus. He 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.

Human remains and population genetics

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 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 () in Nakhon Sawan province and Wat Chom Chuen () 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

Buddhist and Brahmanical practice

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 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.

Revire argues the same from the medallion sites. Khok Chang Din, the U Thong site that produced three of the inscribed medallions, has yielded only Hindu remains, among them a stone ekamukhaliṅga. Lucien Fournereau reported a liṅga and a large pre-Angkorian water channel at the Phra Pathommachedi in the late nineteenth century. An excavation by the Fine Arts Department at Wat Thammasala nearby found a quadrangular yoni-like base in a corner shrine of a monument until then read as wholly Buddhist. Revire has not seen that report, and cautions that some of the Hindu material from Nakhon Pathom may be of the later Angkorian period. On patronage he turns to the Indian record, where royal donors are outnumbered by monks, nuns, merchants and lay people, and kings figure as protectors of Buddhist foundations rather than as their sponsors. He sees no reason to suppose early Southeast Asia was different. Stephen Murphy reaches the same conclusion for northeast Thailand, where the archaeological evidence points to lay communities as the main Buddhist patrons.

The languages of the record divide along the same lines. Sanskrit was the language of the gods and of the royal elite, and its use went with the presence of Brahmins, who took part in state affairs and royal ceremonies even where the rites themselves were Buddhist. The Wat Maheyong inscription (K. 407), in Sanskrit and datable to about the seventh or eighth century, is probably the first attestation in Thailand of Brahmins and Buddhists taking part in the same ritual. Its provenance is unsettled, the stone being reported both from Nakhon Si Thammarat and, by Fournereau, from a Wat Mahyeng he placed in Nakhon Pathom province. Pāli and Prakrit, by contrast, were the main languages of Buddhist canonical inscriptions in early mainland Southeast Asia.

Merit and the Pali inscriptions

Buddhist life centred on merit (; ), 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 (). Donative inscriptions in Mon, Khmer and Sanskrit, commissioned by rulers, local elites and ordinary laypeople, record gifts of land, cattle and labourers to the , 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. Eng Jin Ooi and Peter Skilling count at least forty three-dimensional Dvāravatī wheels recovered in Thailand. About twelve are inscribed. The wheels come mainly from Lopburi, Suphan Buri, Chai Nat, Nakhon Pathom, Ratchaburi, Phetchaburi and Nakhon Sawan. Cutting Pali into stone for public display, and depositing inscribed Pali in reliquaries, went on for perhaps two centuries. Many of the texts were short, often a single stanza; the excerpts from the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta are among the longest.

No Pali manuscripts survive from South or Southeast Asia from this period, so these inscriptions are the only direct witness to the language as it then stood. Ooi and Skilling add that Sri Lanka has no early Pali inscriptions at all, and that Burma has many of about the same date but none carrying the Dhammacakkappavattana. The largest of the witnesses is a broken wheel about 180cm across from Manorom district in Chai Nat, dated to the seventh century in the Fine Arts Department's corpus of inscriptions. Its felloes, the curved segments of the rim, carry the sutta's passage on the four ariyasacca in three phases and twelve aspects, which the two render as realities for the noble ones rather than as noble truths. An octagonal pillar found with it carries verses that recur in Buddhaghosa's commentaries.

The spelling of these texts departs from later standard Pali, with puvve for pubbe, ariyya for ariya, and paṃñā beside paññā within one inscription. Ooi and Skilling suggest the inconsistency may point to oral rather than written transmission. From the keywords cut on the spokes they conclude that Dvāravatī Buddhists knew the teachings of the Paṭisambhidāmagga. They caution that the inscriptions cannot show the work itself circulating in the region in its present form. They go on to surmise that the making of monumental wheels was a devotional practice particular to Dvāravatī, not found elsewhere that Theravāda was practised.

Trade and economy

Agricultural base

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 were both served by the Tha Chin River and so by the Gulf of Thailand.

Mudar estimated what that base could support. From the lowest recorded Central Plain yields 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. That 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 assume 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. She suggested this reflected different ways of raising grain. Transplanted rice was grown in small fields near the western towns and was easier to supervise, against broadcast rice in larger fields further out in the east, more efficiently gathered after harvest.

Long-distance trade

Ian Glover places the mainland Southeast Asian communities of these centuries in trade networks that reached the Bay of Bengal to the west and the South China Sea to the east by the third to sixth centuries. He describes the same centuries as a period of convergence, in which local societies took in South Asian influences and in time formed identities of their own.

The Phanom Surin shipwreck in the Tha Chin delta, a stitched-plank vessel of the Arab dhow tradition, provided the first direct evidence of West Asian shipping in the region. It was excavated between 2013 and 2015 and dated to the late eighth or early ninth century. 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. The excavation report places the Phanom Surin ship in the ninth or tenth century. Turquoise-glazed ware has also been reported from Dong Lakhon, and one of the U Thong sherds was set into stucco ornament. Excavation at Wat Mahathat Worawihan in Ratchaburi produced fragments of lustre ware, an opaque-white-glazed painted ware made at Basra.

Glass beads give a second line of evidence for the origins of imports. Saritpong Khunsong reports an analysis by electron probe micro-analyser of 186 beads from ten Dvaravati sites in the central plain; 176 could be characterised, and these divided into seven compositional groups. Mineral-soda alumina glass of Indian or Sri Lankan origin accounts for 151 of them and occurs at every site. Twelve are of a Middle Eastern plant-ash soda-lime composition. Five are lead glass, which Robert Brill and Gan Fuxi treat as diagnostic of Chinese production, one each from Noen Phlapphla in Suphan Buri, Ho Ek and Thammasala in Nakhon Pathom, Wat Pun in Lopburi, and Si Thep. Khunsong leaves open whether these reached Dvaravati by direct trade with China, through other ports, or through intermediaries.

Supitchar Jindawattanaphum has described a sword type she assigns to the Dvaravati period, a long single-edged blade with a squared tip and a ring at the end of the hilt. She reports examples said to have been found in the Mae Klong in Kanchanaburi province and in Chiang Rai province, and derives the form from the Chinese ring-pommel sword, the huanshoudao. She further suggests that a stance with a short weapon and a shield, incised on a pottery sherd from Chansen, may reflect the south Indian martial art kalarippayattu, carried along the same route as the Pallava script.

Khunsong takes the foreign merchants reaching Dvaravati to have been mainly Arab or Persian. He cites Derek Heng for the position that Chinese merchants began sailing on their own account only in the eleventh century. On the same account, no wreck built to Chinese technique yet found in Chinese or Southeast Asian waters is earlier than the thirteenth.

Metals and coinage

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. Whether such coins served as currency, as bullion and royal gifts, or as consecration deposits is disputed. Silver coins stamped with a conch, or with a rising sun and śrīvatsa symbols, have been recovered in numbers around U-Ta Pao in Chai Nat, thirty-two of them now in the Bangkok National Museum. Two Abbasid copper coins are recorded at U Thong. One bears a date equivalent to 767, in the caliphate of al-Mansur, though its provenance is not established. The other, of al-Mahdi, who reigned from 775 to 785, was excavated by the Fine Arts Department at monument 12 of Khok Chang Din. A fragment of a Tang coin was recovered at monument 86 of Si Mahosot.

Art

The style's diagnostics are the smooth, diaphanous U-shaped robe, which terminates just above the ankles and is shared with Gupta images of India, and the double vitarka mudra, a standing Buddha with both hands raised, which is confined to Dvaravati art and to some later Lopburi-period work. Carved stone dharmacakra are its other hallmark, combining the South Asian wheel with local decorative motifs. The earliest pieces are compared with the Sarnath school of the 5th century in India and dated in Thailand to the 6th or 7th; a middle phase of the 8th shows Pala influence from Bengal, and a late phase of about the 9th to 10th shows Khmer influence. 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, makarass, 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.

Historiography

Formation of the concept

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, , 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".

The extent they gave the name varies widely. Damrong took Dvāravatī to cover all of what is now Thailand, and Cœdès the central plain as far north as Lopburi. Pierre Dupont worked with four Mon zones in the central plain and Quaritch Wales with the central plain and the northeast. Phasook Indrawooth has the culture spreading from the central plain into the northeast. Robert Brown restricts Dvāravatī to the central plain, with the northeast as an interface between it and Khmer culture. Ooi and Skilling, writing in 2026, put the Dvāravatī period at roughly the sixth to ninth centuries.

A second assumption travelled with the first, that Dvāravatī was Buddhist and Zhenla Hindu or Brahmanical. Jan Boeles held in 1964 that the inscribed medallions settled the question, giving a Buddhist ruler of Śrī Dvāravatī in the Nakhon Pathom area in the seventh century. Srisakra Vallibhotama divided the Chao Phraya valley on the same lines, a Buddhist west and a Hindu east centred on Si Mahosot. Revire rejects the division, since Buddhist material occurs in the east and in Zhenla and Hindu sculpture in the west. He proposes instead that the two be treated as parts of a single transregional ritual complex, by which he means a shared field of ritual practice and not a political unit.

Terminology and evidence

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, and argues that the sense intended must be stated explicitly in each case. He 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.

Stephen Murphy and Miriam Stark put the objection to the categories themselves. Introducing a collection on the first millennium in 2016, they asked contributors to work past Pyu, Dvāravatī, Pre-Angkor and Cham as spatial units. Epigraphic and art-historical evidence, on their account, shows the populations behind those names communicating with and influencing one another. They hold that the entanglements of the period produced discrete, state-like polities more alike in aesthetics and ideology than is generally recognised.

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, a study of the script 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 from the form of its script and its style 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.

1. Color legend for the seat of the polity

Notes

References

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,

• 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.

• สุรพล ดำริห์กุล, ประวัติศาสตร์และศิลปะหริภุญไชย, กรุงเทพฯ: สำนักพิมพ์เมืองโบราณ, 2004, .

• 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.