Isanavarman I Founds Isanapura and Its Shiva Temples

Around 618, within a reign an inscription on site fixes to 13 September 627, King Isanavarman I of Chenla established a new royal capital, Isanapura, at Sambor Prei Kuk on the Stung Sen River in what is now Kampong Thom province, central Cambodia, two hundred thirty eight years after King Bhadravarman founded the My Son Sanctuary in Champa in 380, already recorded here, and roughly one hundred twenty two years before Queen Lokamahadevi built the Virupaksha Temple at Pattadakal in 740, also recorded here. Isanavarman's own name, meaning protege of Ishana, a title of Shiva, named the god his reign served. At Isanapura he raised Prasat Sambor, its principal shrine dedicated to Shiva under the name Gambhireshvara, alongside the walled Prasat Yeah Puon complex, whose twenty two brick sanctuaries, five of them octagonal, an architectural form found almost nowhere else in early Khmer building, housed further images of Shiva and his attendant deities. Isanavarman's Chenla had absorbed the weakened remnants of Funan, the Mekong delta's earlier Indianized kingdom, carrying its Sanskrit and Shaiva inheritance inland to a new center of royal patronage. Isanapura's temples, among the oldest substantial brick Hindu monuments surviving in mainland Southeast Asia, anchored Chenla's court religion for the century before the Khmer capital shifted definitively toward Angkor, and the site was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 2017 as the archaeological remains of ancient Isanapura.