Since the Second World War stopped activities of the French scholars in Vietnam, Campā (or Champa) history was long neglected. The Chams as an ethnic minority within Vietnam had few, if any, opportunities to study their own past during the civil war and few scholars paid any attention to the ancient history of the region before the end of the twentieth century. The last decade, however, has shown a rapid renaissance of Campā studies. The history of the ancient kingdoms of Campā, so far generally viewed through George Maspero's courageous narrative Le royaume de Champa (1928), was the topic of two major international conferences. The first, ‘Workshop on New Scholarship on Champa’, was held at the National University of Singapore on 6–7 August 2004, while the second, ‘New Research in Historical Campā Studies’, was held at the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) in Paris on 18–19 June 2012. Chams themselves held a conference on contemporary issues in San Jose on 7–8 June 2007. These conferences reveal considerable efforts to reconstruct the complex socio-economic, political, linguistic, religious, and cultural processes of Campā and Cham history.
The early history of Campā has been reconstructed on the basis of ancient inscriptions left by numerous rulers and dignitaries. These inscriptions were written in Sanskrit or Old Cham and have been found throughout Central Vietnam. French scholars of the late nineteenth through early twentieth century (Etienne Aymonier, Abel Bergaigne, Louis Finot, Edouard Huber, Paul Mus, and George Cœdès) discovered, partially transcribed, and in some cases translated nearly 174 inscriptions, paying relatively more attention to those composed in Sanskrit. An Indian historian, Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, reproduced all published texts in Devanagari script and translated into English those texts which had been published with translation into French (Ancient Indian colonies in the Far East: Vol. I. Champa. Book III: The Inscriptions of Champa, Lahore: Punjab Sanskrit Books Depot, 1927). But a synthesising catalogue with reproductions has never been published. Majumdar entirely omits reproductions in his edition whereas the French epigraphists normally did include them, but their publications always concentrated on small groups of epigraphic records. Moreover, they were not sufficiently proficient in the language to carefully translate Old Cham inscriptions, or indeed to translate them at all.
Fortunately, since the end of the twentieth century, the epigraphic study of Campā inscriptions has once again started to attract scholarly attention. Anne-Valérie Schweyer, Arlo Griffiths and William Southworth published several recently found inscriptions that could not be used in the historical syntheses by Maspero, Le royaume de Champa (1928), Majumdar (1927), and Cœdès, Les états hindouisés d'Indochine et d'Indonésie (1948); and The Indianized states of Southeast Asia, ed. W.F. Vella, trans. Susan B. Cowing (1968).
Now Arlo Griffiths, Amandine Lepoutre, William Southworth and Thành Phần have published a catalogue of Campā inscriptions from the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Danang (Bảo Tàng Điêu Khắc Chăm Đà Nẵng) as a part of the EFEO project ‘Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā’ (http://isaw.nyu.edu/publications/inscriptions/campa/index.html). Fortunately, it contains beautiful black-and-white pictures of all inscriptions included in the catalogue as well as colour photographs of bases, pedestals, and steles on which these texts are carved. In fact, it is the first publication by which a reader can learn the palaeography of ancient Cham scripts whose origin lies in the Indian Brāhmī script. Moreover, this catalogue is bilingual as it consists of two parts, the first in Vietnamese, and the second in English. This accessiblity for any English-speaking reader is, for many readers, an evident advance on the past, when French dominated this field. And its Vietnamese part gives the Vietnamese-speaking readers a possibility to look more precisely at the ancient history of Central Vietnam.
The volume opens with a Foreword by the Museum Director Võ Văn Thắng, then follow a Preface and an Introduction by the authors. They summarise the history of research on Campā (the spelling adopted for the catalogue according to Sanskrit and Old Cham spelling; I follow it here) inscriptions and a history of the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Danang and its epigraphic collection. The next section categorises various types of objects with inscriptions. A short paragraph enumerates the inscriptions from the museum collection (pp. 19–20, 183–4). The authors rightly remind the reader of the differences between script and language, transliteration and transcription, and outline palaeographic changes in the development of Southern Brāhmī to modern Cham script. Two sections deal with the use of Sanskrit and the use of the Old Cham language in the inscriptions of Campā. The penultimate section of the Introduction describes the inscriptions as ‘basically legal documents recording some kind of transaction’, ‘directly concerned with the worship of the gods’, and ‘issued by or on the behalf of worldly authorities: the kings, the queens and their high officers’ (p. 193). The last paragraph lists conventions of the signs used in transliteration and translation.
The order of inscriptions published in the catalogue follows the conventional C numbers as introduced by Cœdès in 1908 meaning ‘Campā [inscription] No…’ that has the advantage of enabling a quick search for the inscription needed.
Two inscriptions shed new light on the later history of Campā: a monumental inscription from Drang Lai C.43 in Gia Lai Province issued by king Vīrabhadravarmadeva in 1357; another inscription by the same ruler C.161 from Chiêm Sơn in the Quảng Nam Province that was issued in 1443/4. Few inscriptions belong to the epoch of king Śrī Jaya Siṃhavarmadeva: C.182 from Chánh Mẫm, C.183 and, perhaps, C.184 from Tháp Mẩm in Bính Ðịnh Province. Tháp Mẩm is also the provenance of the two other inscriptions of the thirteenth century, C.185 and C.192; the former bears the name of a prince Śrī Harivarmadeva. Inscribed terracotta pieces C.176, C.177 and a few ones that have not yet received an inventory number can be dated from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Griffiths and Lepoutre ascribe the inscription C.181 to ‘a few centuries later’ than the tenth century (p. 251). The name of Śrī Harivarmadeva occurs in inscription C.64 of Chiên Ðàn in Quảng Nam Province, but the editors date it from the eleventh century.
Many inscriptions of the catalogue date from the ninth to tenth century, including the northernmost Campā inscription on a stone beam of Rồn in Quảng Bình Province; the inscriptions on the Rāmāyaṇa reliefs C.152 = C.166 and C.157 originating presumably from Quảng Nam Province; C.175 from Khánh Lễ in Bính Ðịnh Province; C.226 of unknown origin; C.227 and C.228 from An Mỹ and C.236 from Ðồng Dương in Quảng Nam Province; and a new fragment of unknown origin donated by Lâm Dũ Xênh. The inscription C.211 from Khuê Trung near Đà Nẵng has a firm dating 19 or 20 February 899. It was issued by king Śrī Jaya Siṃhavarmadeva. This is a bilingual text in Sanskrit and old Cham.
The earliest inscriptions in the catalogue date from the seventh century. These texts include two well-known inscriptions from Mỹ Sơn — C.87 and C.81 — and two bas-relief blocks with Indian characters from the same site C.230. Griffiths has managed to decipher the precise date of C.81 that previously was placed in the 710s: ‘Face B is dated between 13 and 26 February, 712 AD, and face A is likely datable within the same interval; face С is attributable, on the basis of its palaeography but more specifically its contents, to the middle of the 9th century AD’ (p. 225).
He has also offered a more comprehensive translation of face С than that made by Majumdar (1927, pp. 37–8). The dating of face С which mentions the two early Campā kings Bhadravarman and Rudravarman from the ninth century suggests several centuries of Cham memories in the Thu Bồn River Valley.
Griffiths's translation of C.87 differs from earlier versions by Finot, Majumdar, and Schweyer, but only slightly (pp. 232–3). A few corrections seem optional, such as ‘evils’ for apāyebhyaḥ instead of ‘danger’ by Majumdar or ‘épreuves’ or ‘cross’ by Finot; ‘earth’ for jagat instead of ‘world’, and ‘misery’ for kṣata instead of ‘wound’. Sometimes Griffiths offers more prosaic translations: lokasthiti turns ‘the situation in the world’ while Majumdar translates it as ‘the rule of the Universe’ (1927, p. 31).
I propose another translation of the eighth stanza ‘iti yasya kīrttir itthaṃ saṃbhūtā labdhabhūmikā sthāne | sa śrīprakāśadharmmā campākṣonīśvaro jayati’: instead of ‘So triumphs he, Śrī Prakāśadharman, king of Campā, whose fame, originating in this manner, has fittingly taken root!’ (p. 233) to ‘So conquers this lord of the land Campā Śrī Prakāśadharman whose fame has taken root in the lands obtained!’
But the main historical problem is the personality of the king named Śrī Prakāśadharman. Historians often point out that the inscriptions mentioning a certain Vikrāntavarman, a known coronation name of Śrī Prakāśadharman, were issued between 658 (C.96) and 741 CE (C.74). This means that, if he was the sole Vikrāntavarman, he ruled for 83 years. The Mỹ Sơn inscription C.74 mentions a certain Naravāhanavarman who could be a king of Campā judging from his name and his good deeds to a Lakṣmī sanctuary. This leads to my question: was Śrī Prakāśadharman the main referent of both C.87 and C.81 or of only one of them? This historical problem was neglected in the catalogue. Judging from the text, Griffiths seems sure that there was only one Śrī Prakāśadharman-Vikrāntavarman.
In any case, this catalogue is a significant sign of the renaissance of Campā studies in the world and a magnificent piece of evidence of scientific progress since the early twentieth century.
