Cornelius Beach Bradley - The Oldest Known Writing in Siamese: The Inscription of Phra Ram Khamhæng of Sukhothai

Cornelius Beach Bradley

1293 A.D

Published by Good Press, 2020

EAN 4064066067724

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T HE author gratefully acknowledges his special indebted-to:H. R. R. Prince Damrong Rajanubhab, Minister of the Interior, for permission to use the resources of the Vajiraana Library and to have free access to the Skhothi stone, and particularly for his invaluable personal assistance in the identification of places named in the text; to Oscar Frankfurter, Ph. D., Secretary of the National Library, for the generosity with which he has honored every draft made upon the stores of his learning and scholarship, and for his kindly interest, wise counsel, and unwearied helpfulness that have attended every stage of the work; to Phr Mha Wcha Thm and Luang Chnthramat, his learned assistants, for almost daily help rendered by them in all matters of Siamese philology and archeology; to Mr. R. W. Giblin, F.R.G.S. of the Royal Survey Department, for the reproductions of the text which accompany this paper; and in the North, to Chu Suriyawong of Chiengmai, to Phr Nphi Sipsankhn of Wat Chieng Mn, and, not least, to Rev. Daniel McGilvary, D.D., for elucidation of many difficult points involving special knowledge of the Lao country, customs, and speech.

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Mr. President, Members of the Siam Society, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I feel very sensibly the honor you have done me in asking me to present first of all before you some of the results of my months of study here. Those studies lie, as you all know, in the very heart of the Dryasdust realm, and are not supposed to be interesting, or intelligible even, to any save dryasdust people. I felt sure that no other sort of people would come here this evening. I confess therefore to no little surprise at the large and distinguished gathering that I see before mesurprise not unmingled with fear at thought of what you may be ready to do to me before the evening is done. My own impression of people who work on inscriptions has not greatly improved on closer acquaintance with them. My subject has one point of general interest, however, which I may do well to mention at once. The earliest known inscription in Siamese is a unique document, not merely among the documents of Siam, but among the documents of the world. If I am not entirely wrong, there is no other document extant which records the achievement of letters for an untamed speech by one to whom that speech was native, and which at the same time fully illustrates that achievement. When we recall the part these very letters of this very inscription have played in the culture and the life of the Thai race both north and south, and when we reflect that the very form in which we read and write Siamese today is the lineal descendant of thatnot far removed and but little changedwe may be interested to know something more about it.

There is another point also. As your President has just told us, the inscription itself has repeatedly been published, with transliterations, translations, and essays upon it. Yet few things in Bangkok seem so little known, or understood, or rightly valued. Few even of those who know something about it have ever seen the stone, or know where it stands, or have any clear idea of what it is all about. In spite of all that these various editors have doneI am not sure but I should have said, in consequence of what they have donethe real nature and intent of this perfectly direct and simple-hearted utterance seem at many points wholly misapprehended, One editor finds in itapparently for no other cause than that it is now the thing to doa complete code of civil law. Another finds in it a complete ritual of religious observance and ceremony. Another varies the now somewhat hackneyed performance of discovering the lost tribes of Israel, by unearthing, forsooth from the ruins of a forest-monasteryor rather from the word