 Okay, so good morning for those joining in the UK and this part of the world. Good afternoon if you're in Pondicherry. Good evening if you're in Phnom Penh. Welcome to this fourth lecture of this year's research seminar series organized by the Southeast Asian Art Academic Program and the Center of Southeast Asian Studies at SOAS. We welcome Professor Dominic Goodall to speak to us today and his title really challenges us to consider why do we know so little about the goddess and her worship amongst the ancient Khmeres. A few words about Dominic. He's a Sanskritist and historian of religion, who's been a member of the FAO since 2000. He became head of the Pondicherry Center of the FAO in 2002, where he remained until April 2011. He was then posted in Paris from 2011 to 2015 where he gave lectures at the École Pratique de la Tude, the religious sciences section, principally on Cambodian inscriptions in Sanskrit and on the history of Shaivism from unpublished sources. Now once again posted in Pondicherry where he continues to pursue his scholarly interests, in particular in Sanskrit poetry and in the history of the Shaiva Siddhanta. Among his publications are editions and translations of works of poetry in Sanskrit and of hitherto unpublished Shaiva scriptures and theological commentaries. He's currently a professor at the FAO co-editor with Dr. Mariana Rastelli of the Viennese Dictionary of Tantric terminology, the Tantric Abhidhana Kosher. He currently participates in two ERC projects, Shiva Dharma and Dharma. And in May 2016 he was elected the corresponding member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Literature in Paris. So many words here about about the lecture today in Dominic's words. All of us start with misconceptions about Khmer inscriptions, about what Khmer inscriptions and art can tell us the most find ourselves asking, why is it so hard to marry iconographic and epigraphic data. There are many partial answers. Often we have lost crucial parts of epigraphs or misinterpret what survives. The descriptions were of course in any case not written to inform subsequent generations of strangers about religious ideas and practices, nor to describe and explain the installations they record. So historians are trying to establish answers to their questions by eavesdropping on a discourse that is really about something else. Furthermore, most of the statuary has also been lost, melted down for precious metals, or damaged beyond legibility. And in any case, unlike churches, Hindu iconography doesn't necessarily say much about the sect orientation of its temples. Of course we can turn to prescriptive Sanskrit texts surviving elsewhere that lay down how images should look and how they are to be worshipped. What has been published of such literature is mostly South Indian and post 12th century, describing notions practices and iconography specific to the Tamil speaking south of the Chola and post Chola periods. And some deities such as the goddess and Skanda, although ubiquitous in sculpture painting and literature do not seem to have surviving corpora of first millennium prescriptive literature governing their worship. Each of these issues could be explored in a separate lecture and goddess in Cambodia is already a huge topic in itself. This lecture will focus on a small handful of objects that elucidate a tiny part of that topic and its difficulties. And without further ado I'd like to welcome Dominic. Dominic the screen is yours. Thank you very much indeed for that full introduction and thank you very much in the first place for inviting me to this series of lectures. I think of myself as the historian of the Indian religions and studying Cambodian documents as always a hobby, which gives me enormous pleasure. But I have to confess that I chose this topic, partly because I thought that is something I would really like to have thought more about. And therefore this is not a very polished assessment of the entirety of the question. There may be many little pieces of information that I have forgotten to mention or not stumbled upon. I rather started to think about this in recently. So I was going to start I'd say one way of dealing with such an enormous topic is to start with objects, which is what I said I would do and one of the objects is the one you see in the photograph there. It's a photograph. Sorry, it's a photograph taken by Claude Jack recently deceased of an inscription. First of all, I thought that I would start after in fact many of the questions I asked, or the main question I have already in fact, in effect answered in that summary, but it remains to illustrate some of these points. But I recently stumbled across this rather fine summary of the issue of goddesses in Bruno Deges book, like that. And so I've given a short translation missing out a little bit here and there. Cambodia did not see the developments and the worship of the goddess that are observable in India from the 13th century. So this is a point worth making Indian religious history races on beyond a period when it marches in tandem with what is happening in Cambodia in Indonesia in other parts of the transcriptic world. And I think what I think Deges is thinking of there is, for example, that there isn't that we do not find evidence of sharp that come to say goddess based worship in Cambodia. So there are a lot of developments that took place after even the 12th which do not seem to be matched. The goddesses often reduced the role of consults are often difficult to recognize. Omar Parvati and Sri Lakshmi can be identified by their headdresses, which reproduced those of Shiva and Vishnu. Exceptions are Pragya Parvamita, so Buddhist deity recognizable by her quatra, and Durga, she who kills the buffalo demon Mahishasa Ramadhani. And actually these statues seem to disappear from the beginning of the Angkoran period, while inscriptions commemorating their installations multiply. Among other independent romantic goddesses, only Saraswati and Ganga seem to have enjoyed a certain popularity, even if no images of them have been identified. So there he touches on an important point. There are so many images that we seem to have mentioned that we cannot identify among the statues that survive. In my lecture, I haven't really said anything about river goddesses. I feel that they're a class apart. Saraswati is maybe an exception because she is both a river goddess and a goddess of learning. And then he finally adds, there remains the paradoxical case of the series of seven or eight mothers, who by the way are usually called maatri in Sanskrit sources. These mothers totally absent from epigraphy are represented twice or perhaps three times, all three from the 10th century. And then he observes this interesting point, the violent character of the mothers could explain their lack of success. What he suggests there is that somehow among the commands, there was no taste for bloody frightening goddesses as we clearly see in many parts of the Indian subcontinent. Whether this is true or whether we assume you're missing the evidence, we don't know. Sorry, one more slightly boring phase of text. When I was invited to give this lecture, I was asked to give a biography, but I misread the email and thought it was a bibliography, which is why you might have seen a bibliography on the website. The bibliography, like all bibliographies, full of terrible lacunae and such. So I then came up with this other bibliography, which again, this is our many, many important publications. But for what it's worth, the first of all work is of course, the first major work on Indian religions in Cambodia. The second, an article by my own guru, Alexis Sanderson, which as many will know, is a book length study really about Shaivism, but many, many things touched on. Bihani Salkar's book on heroic Shaivism, this is a relatively recent book on the cult of Durga in ancient Indian kingship. The next one mentions in the introduction some history of the worship of the goddess Goli, the pale one. And then my colleague Shala Schmidt has written many important articles about the vice of a background of Durga. We often associate the goddess Shiva, but she has shown among other things that there is a palpable vice of a background, but I think we will see how this is relevant. A few other things, Anna Schlatzka's article on the iconographical chapters from the Deviya Moda and the art of Bengal. I mentioned that because we look at art historical books, which all of them have been very much influenced, I think, by Indian artistry, by the work of Rao iconography of Hindu deities, I forget what it's called, in two volumes. And that in turn depends very much on South Indian texts. And here, I think that with this publication, Anna Schlatzka has furnished us with some published, some early non-South Indian scriptural teachings about Hindu iconography. Also very important, Yuko Yokochi's various articles, I just quoted one there. I think that her contribution to the study of goddesses is also very large and important. She shows through large mythology, but also iconography, how complex the case of the multiple goddesses who are in some mythologies, in some mythological accounts being fused with one another and others somehow distinguished. And I think that what her very clear and extremely erudite articles are very precious for eliminating the subject. Okay, a map. This is just to say that the first object is really south of Phnom Penh. So we're down here in the River Delta. And that's where I have this 35, that's more or less where it is. And so this inscription that I'm going to look at first is a very interesting case. And you might at first think it is already published. She has published in the novel and Sceptre Combeau, the Savaras book, but she has published only one side of the document. So we only have the Khmer text. But the thing actually has two sides. And you can see, sorry, many of you may not read French, but one of what she assumes from this is that there is a lady of high status, and she's designated by who she thinks has installed and a statue of Chandaka Kaini and a statue of Mahagannapati. And she speculates in that first note under her commentary on the right hand side. She speculates that this Chandaka Kaini, it could be a name of Durga or it could be the name of Durga, which is Kaini, plus the name of Shiva. And you could imagine therefore that it could be a couple enlaced, a couple embracing each other. So there are various suppositions she has about this situation. But now let me show you what it looks like in the establishes that we have from today. On the left hand side, you can see a recent stampage. And you can see on the right hand side, the Sanskrit side, the left hand side, the Khmer side of this document. And in fact, when we look at older stampages, you can see how much damage that has been. But you also see something that provides, I think a clue that could have told the editor had she been able to see it, that this was not an image of Shiva and Durga or Kaini. The clue is at the summit. Do you see that on the left hand side, the thing, the emblem has been worn away. And I don't know whether you can at once recognize what that emblem is. The one on the right, I think you can see, I tell you that it is a chakra, that's to say it's a discus, which is one of the weapons we usually associate with Vishnu. But on the left, therefore, you can probably now see that sitting on a lotus blossom stylized lotus blossom, there is the other of the emblems that we often associate with Vishnu, namely the conch. Yes, so here you see them a little bit larger. And you can see that when these photographs were taken many years ago by Claude Jack, the emblem of the conch was still largely visible. Since then, the stone has been suffered, has been broken into, but curiously, the state of the stone now allows one really to read the first Sanskrit stanza with greater ease, I would say, than was possible before. And now I reveal what, if this inscription starts with a verse, it's a Sanskrit verse inscription, as you know, all the inscriptions in Cambodia, the French Sanskrit with very few exceptions are in the verse. And it seems to say, chanda kātyāyini devi, sthāpita yagyadāyinā, dolga dinnena sāyar, kaverum pāliyatām pūryi. And what I think this might mean is the goddess chanda kātyāyini has been installed by dolga dinnena, the patron of this religious act, in a place where she may protect the town kaverum. So this is very exciting for various reasons. We have a brand new toponym, kaverum, which seems not to be a Sanskrit toponym, it seems to belong to some other language. We have the name of the CNN, chanda kātyāyini, the name of the goddess. And chanda kātyāyini, kātyāyini is a well-established name of dolga. Chanda kātyāyini means fierce kātyāyini. We have also the name of the sponsor, who is not in fact a woman. His name is also quite interesting, dolga dinnena. This is not a regular Sanskrit name. I think that, sorry about the noise here, I'll just close that window for a second. Dolga dinnena looks as though it may be formed out of a, it may be a partly portrait name. So there isn't very much evidence that has been widely discussed of portraits in Cambodia, other than of course Paan, which is one of the portraits. But this name, dolga dinnena, looks to me like it may be a different sort of portrait. And that makes it an interesting name. It looks like it means one given by dinnena, but given by dolga. But there are plenty of doubts, of course. I'm not very certain that it's reading Paan Lyatam at the end, which in any case would be grammatically a little bit odd. But it seems to be evidence of a fierce goddess who is by herself. And in the Sanskrit text we have no mention of Mahagana pati, as we have in the Khmer text, who sounds therefore as though he must be a sort of accompanying figure. Not a principal deity, but a subsidiary one. So it seems to be evidence of a lone standing relatively fierce goddess who is tasked with protecting a town. And until now I don't think we had such clear evidence of this category of goddess in the Khmer corpus. Only a couple of other carpeines seem to be mentioned in the Khmer epigraphical record. One is Priyankore in K-56. Another is not really normally visible in the published record because it's in the inscription of a certain Yogyavaraja, the man who produced the Bante Stray Temple. But it's one of these inscriptions which is not equally published. So the question is not legible and therefore this one may slip through the net if you search through the published corpus. Durga, by the way, is also rather a rare name and this is something I will in the corpus of inscriptions and that's something I'll come back to. But we do find Chandrakar Kaini in Nepal and the purpose of this page on the right is to indicate that this is a page from Bihani Salkar's book which I was mentioning. It's a message, a page in which she speaks about a Nepalese manuscript, a text surviving in Nepalese manuscripts discovered by Dimakar Acharya, which refers to Chandrakar Kaini as a lady who obviously commands sleep and her mantra is quoted there. So Chandrakar Kaini finds parallel in Nepalese material or in material that survives at any rate in Nepal. Yes, coming back to the emblems of conch and discus, Shankar and Chakra, which we associate with Vishnu. In fact, we should really at this early period be associating them with the goddess also. And this is a case that could have been adduced to skip that support because this is a list of servants or slaves given to a goddess. And at the top, on either side of this pre-angorian stela, we see again disc and conch. In fact, in this case, the waters were a bit muddied by Louis Fino, who in this paragraph explains how there are two donors mentioned on both on the two faces. One is somebody called Sharla Grama Swami and the other is Aditya Swami. And Sharla Grama, he says, is the name for this shell. And so on his side, we have a conch. And on the other side, Aditya Swami is the name of the sun and so we see a sun. But this is really not correct. So Sharla Grama is rather this kind of object. It's a fossilized ammonite, which becomes the an iconic icon of Vishnu. And comes really from only a very small area above a certain village called Sharla Grama in Nepal. And then spread right across the Indian world. And many people choose to worship Vishnu in the form of the Sharla Grama. What we have instead is in fact a conch and a discus. And if one looks here to Nepal, for example, but if one looks to contemporary inscriptions in other parts of the Sanskrit world, you can find that in putting at the top of a stellar, some representation of a conch and a chakra is quite common. In Nepal, it gradually starts to get replaced by a bull, a bull sitting down, which we also find by the way in Cambodian inscriptions. I think that there's really no doubt these images, this K66 inscription also has conch and discus. And Aditya Swami and Sharla Grama Swami, that's a red herring. Yes, nice and clear here. Yes, as I was saying, we associate these emblems with Vishnu, but there are plenty of goddess sculptures early on also, which revealed that they should be associated with the goddess also. I mentioned the contribution of my colleague Charlotte Schmidt has been to show how deeply imbricated in the Vaishnava pantheon the goddess was at an early period in India. And I think we find evidence of the same in Cambodia. I say in Cambodia, I mean in the world, in the Khmer world, because here what I'm showing you is an image that was found from the Bank of the Baha'i, the Belon Bhattu, so in Laos. Yes, you can see that it has been labeled Lakshmi, and I put quotation marks around that because one of the things I wanted to highlight is how very labile, slippery and changeable these names, particularly of goddesses are, how difficult it is to say what kind of goddess we have here. Of course we could say that this is Lakshmi because she seems to be a spouse of Vishnu if you think that the emblems of Kanch and Diskas are very distinctively Vaishnava and therefore show that she is very closely related to Vishnu, so closely that she is a spouse. We also find images of the goddess with these emblems when she seems to be less of a spouse and more a terrifying independent lady. Here this is from the National Museum of Cambodia, and I don't do this to criticise anybody here, I just indicate how the statue is labelled, which illustrates another sight problem, I think that we often see what we think we see. So this is described as Dhulga laying low, the demon buffalo, but I think you would agree there is no visible buffalo. However, there are many images from the south of India, which show exactly this form, Dhulga with a variable number of arms, here eight, and she is standing on a buffalo's head. So this is a particularly magnificent example from a temple called Pulamangay, and I'm meant to put in the reference to the long article by Shaila Schmidt and Vijay Venugopal about Pulamangay, but forgot. It's in the bulletin of the film. So what you can see here is indeed the buffalo is represented by the buffalo's head. And you can see a whole lot of weapons in there, but I hope you can also see that two of those weapons on either side of her headdress are a sort of winged discus and a winged conch. So this is on a Shiva temple, so on the north side of Shiva temples in the Tamil speaking south, we see regularly the goddess, who because she is on a Shiva temple is felt to be associated now very firmly with Shiva. But she still bears these emblems of Vishnu, the discus and the conch, among her other arms. So as for the quotation, I put that there because it's from a text called the Kirna Tantra. This is a text I've been working on for many years. So this is a very early Shiva Tantra, and it contains a chapter all about iconography. So this should in a way be the holy grail for art historians because it gives you all kinds of early labels and specifications about iconography which you would think would then be helpful for looking at the wide body of imagery produced after the Kirna Tantra dates to about the 8th century. But you can see that it's not so simple really. Because one thing the label used here is Chandika, which is maybe not what we would expect. We would expect something like Durga or Mahishasa or Marudini. Chandika is usually used for even more fierce forms. But you can see that the text says she once would make Chandika beautiful with eight arms, having breasts, holding shield, sword, bow, arrow, coin, that's to say, chakra and conch and trident. And by an amazing coincidence, I feel all of those emblems are there visible. But you see that she's then described as standing on the line bearing ornaments, slightly angry and crushing a buffalo. Well, she is crushing a buffalo's head. The buffalo, it looks more like an illusion to the myth and the myth itself represented the lion is on her left. And here you can see that they're in the panels for left and right we have the lion. And then we on the right we have a gazelle being held by a little gunner. And that's because in the Tamil south, there is a poetic tradition in Tamil, which shows a fierce goddess, usually called Kottuva, who doesn't have as her vehicle the lion, as we find in North India, but has instead the gazelle. And here, and in several other southern cultures, we find the two combined. And below those vehicles, we find two people cutting off different parts of their body as offerings to the goddess. So even if we didn't think, can't see from her face that she is angry. And even if we see that she is extremely spelt and beautifully shaped, we can tell from this that she is in fact a rather fierce lady. Yeah, so this was just to illustrate how the Kirina is a very old text. The oldest manuscript already dates to 924 of the common era, oldest man is survived and survived still in the Cartman Valley. And so it's in the National Archives of Cartman. And this is one of the polios in question with the description of iconographical matter. Yes, so I wanted to show you that briefly. There are plenty of other temples of this type where we have on the northern face always facing outwards on the northern side of the Shaiva temple. We have this image and some people call this type of image Vishnu Durga. You can see her beautifully dressed on different days dressed differently. That's the Shaiva temple in Pune. You might not be able to see the conch in the disc, but if we come a little bit closer, well, you can see that on the hand that is on our right. When the garment is a little bit to one side you can see that there is in fact coming up a sort between scissor shaped fingers, a conch, and on the other side, we see the blade edge of the discus. This is one of the other parallel hand. Yes, so for many people, this is the spouse of Shiva. And this is an easy conclusion to come to in a way because so what I'm showing you here is the five rings of the entourage of Sadāshiva, according to various tantric texts. The ring which has two names in red is the sort of holy family that contains Nandan and Mahakala, the two watchmen of Shiva, and a dancing figure called Brhingyan, then two sons, Skanda and Ganesha, the bull, sorry, they're British and French too, the bull, and then we have these other two figures Devi and Chandisha. The reason why I put them in red is because they are the only two figures whom you regularly see on South Indian temples. And this illustrates for me, but different people illustrate different things. I think some people say that a South Indian Shiva temple is a kind of expression in stone of what you find in the Agamas, that's the same, which teaches how to worship Shiva. For me, I think it's rather the reverse. What we find is that the figures that are arranged around the South Indian temple, they have a totally independent tradition. The temple does not very clearly or very well express the theology of the Mantramalva, the Shivas of the Hunter, where even though most of these temples today are temples which claim adherence to the system of rules for worship taught in texts of the Shivas of the Hunter. So this is the way things are usually arranged on a South Indian temple. At the bottom you have the entrance and two doorkeepers, the Vala Pahla, in the middle you have the sanctuary. On either side, around the linga, which is in the middle, you have Daksinamupya, south facing for Shiva, and Brahma on the right. You very often have a representation they call Lingolbhava, which shows Shiva emerging from a linga as a column of fire. And then we find Durga on the northern side, as I mentioned, and Vignesha or Ganesha on the southern side. So this is very typical configuration, and here just one more example. Again, the goddess and the Brahma above the spout, which leads the offerings away from the linga. Just briefly, in fact, South Indian temples very often have a goddess shrine on the northern side of the temple. So in this plan that I'm showing you, you can see that the thing in the middle is the Shiva temple, and Shiva is mentioned there in the middle. And then you might be able to see that in the other large shrine, which opens towards the south, we have Amman, that's the Tamil name for the goddess, and she is therefore to the north of the main shrine. And so this feeling that the spouse of Shiva is on the northern side, the Brahma side, which is a well-established convention in Sanskrit literature, but the left or northern side of somebody or a man is where the spouse stands. But in fact, these shrines to the goddess have typically been added relatively late in the 12th century, and from then onwards it becomes a constant feature in South Indian architecture, a goddess shrine placed to the north of the entryway, opening onto the entryway and facing the south. And I think it's very easy then to conflate and say, okay, well this spouse goddess is the same as the goddess who faces north and is on the shrine. But really she's not like a spouse at all. So she looks, she is alone, she is beautiful, she is at the same time fierce and a warrior, and she is not very spouse-like. This is just to mention one case where we have Palava, let's just say a much earlier instance, a knot on the northern face of a Shiva shrine, showing that the tradition really predates that convention. In fact, again she has, looks like eight arms and again prominent are the discus and the conch. Well, that was what I wanted to say about Chandrakarpayani and I see the time is now racing by. I was now going to show you another kind of image, another kind of object, that's to say, not an inscribed image, it's something which I call an an iconic icon. I think I'm not the only person to use this expression. So an iconic icons, I think we are all familiar with them really. So in Sanskrit would be called an avyakta linga. So in Sanskrit, we distinguish between many texts, distinguish between a linga, which is vyakta, that's to say it's an emblem of God, but it's vyakta fully manifest. And that is a way of referring to a full sculpture, and a linga which is avyakta, and that is what Shiva's linga is. So in Shiva's linga popular art leads you to suggest that you might see all kinds of different things in the linga. According to the mantra marga you are supposed to see a ten armed figure called Sadashiva. In fact, the Sadashiva is extremely rarely represented. As you may know the majority of inscriptions of the ancient period in Cambodia that survived, probably the majority are inscriptions that as the principal information, you can record the installation of a linga, by which people tend to mean this kind of linga. But according to the Shiva's adanta what you see in it is this Sadashiva figure. So I think you can already see that this makes some kinds of identification of sex specificity rather difficult. We cannot see, we can, when we worship, we can visualize Sadashiva with ten arms, but what we actually see is this linga, and I think historically there's been considerable development about what is visualized in a linga. In Vakku, which is where this next object, I'm going to show you, comes from, we find evidence, very clear evidence that for a sizable period of time the image there, the linga there, was regarded as being a Shiva's adanta, a shrine of the Shiva's adanta. So this image from the side of the shrine shows the ten arms Sadashiva in a sort of linga of a moment, that's to say he's like a column, and on either side of him are Brahma and Vishnu, the two other principal gods venerating him. Brahma recognizable by his four faces, and Vishnu, again the conch and the disc. On the other side, we see this object, which very much intrigued me. So it's here amongst a clutter of old stones, I don't know whether you can see it's on the ground there, hardly visible. This is a close up view. It's what it looks like is five small balls. Sorry, just to show you this little bit more clearly, five small balls on a pedestal with a rungle with a spout for letting offerings poured onto it, pour off. And it so happens that there are a few passages in Sanskrit literature which speak about a thing called a punch of Rittar or punch of Pinda or punch of Pindi. And so I'm not going to go into them in great detail, but here is one of these pastures, not particularly early, I think, which describes a religious observance for the worship of Goli. Goli being typically the pale spouse of Shiva, to say the goddess has as wife of Shiva. And this explains how you perform in observance where you eat, you fast, you wear red garments, none of the goddess, you keep yourself calm and so forth. And then you worship Goli. And you can worship Goli in an image made of gold, or one of wax or sandalwood, or alternatively, you can use a punch of Rittar. Punch of Rittar, and then there's a little piece of commentary on that, punch of Rittar, punch of Pinda Mayi, the expression punch of Rittar means made of five balls, punch of Pinda Mayi. Okay, so here's another passage, which is doing the same thing it's from a Purana, the Agni Purana, not particularly early texts again and here we seem to learn that Goli can be worshipped in a punch of Pinda, which is somehow her avyakta form, and it seems to be labels for each of the five of the balls, Lalitha, Subhaga, Goli, Kshobhani, and yes, I'm afraid the text should, I think it's got crap there, it should say shakti is the fifth. In any case, in addition to those, we seem to have found what may be the source of this. A doctoral student working here in Pondicherry, Sushmita Das is now working on an edition of a chapter of the Brithat Karn Ultra, which is in texts of the month of Marga, where we find again this punch of Pinda being taught, and I'm not going to give you that passage. So there it is on folios again, an old Nepheli's punk manuscript, testing to the antiquity of that text. So, also in Laos, in this time in the museum, but there are a number of other objects that look like they might be the same. So, they're labeled in the museum as puncha linga, and indeed who is to say whether they are puncha linga or not, it's difficult to tell. But I think that they might really be puncha pingi is another one which is in the reserve in the Bacchus Museum, rather oddly shaped. And in the British Museum, they have a few of such objects. So these are little from Maharashtra from the 18th century, apparently, you can see a linga on a pedestal, and over the linga is the five is the Naga, which you find very commonly of course in Cambodia. The front of the linga is the bull, and to the one side is what I believe is meant to be the an iconic icon of the goddess, namely, instead of a linga she has five balls, heaped up together, like a little heap of cannonballs. A friend of mine sent me this image, which is from cave number 19, Udayagiri. Well, I can't examine it, but I think that this is another instance of the same thing, five balls, undatable, of course, but Udayagiri is a very ancient site I don't know where I might date from. Okay, so second object to illustrate the kind of thing that could very easily escape many people's notice. And these, I think that we should look out for more of these in the future I think that this is a bunch of pingi representing goddess but in an iconic form. I was going to say a few things maybe about other goddesses. Again, what I was really going to talk about was how slippery and difficult the names are. So this is in Prasad Karan, which many of you may have seen, this is a in low relief carved into the brick of the walls of the northern tower of a northern tower is our representations of goddess. And conventionally they're called Shri or Lakshmi because the inscription on the door jam tells us that this is a shrine to Shri. It doesn't really look like any Lakshmi I have seen according to the emblems held. She has here what seems to be a trident, and she has a discuss again, and then I don't show is that an axe, I don't know. And then another emblem I cannot identify in her lower left hand. What we would expect seeing Lakshmi, at least on the Indian subcontinent would be much perhaps something more like this. It's very common to indicate clearly. This is a Lakshmi by putting on either side to elephants to elephants who are pouring over the contents of two pots they hold over Lakshmi so it's Lakshmi being inundated being bathed with water poured by elephants from two pots. So there she is receiving these and you can see beneath her lotus leaves, ladies offering things to her, and she is holding in her, and this is again normal, you can see that she is holding a lotus. I'm not sure whether she's holding two lotus, very often she holds two lotuses. So that's what we would expect for a Lakshmi. Just to illustrate again from the Kirna, remember the Kirna is this early text of the month of Marga I showed you earlier, how labile and messy all the naming conventions are. Here we have the Kirna's description of Saraswati, which I have checked in several manuscripts, and here Saraswati is there holding a Vina musical instrument with lotuses in her hands so she must have enough hands to do those things. And she is with a well-nashed body, ornamented and so forth, and being bathed from pots held up by the trunks and perebellum. So once again, well in this case I feel the Kirna lets us down badly in the sense that it gives us an expectation that we will see a goddess called Saraswati holding a Vina and being bathed by elephants. This is something I have never seen. So some of these iconographical texts seem to be a part of a priestly literature which is not actually very much helped in identifying images. I mean I cannot help having the suspicion that whoever wrote this simply hadn't ever paid attention enough to some of the images that were being described. I mean this may be quite wrong. Of course it's also possible the text has got corrupt, but I say all of this partly because I think some people have a kind of rose tinted spectacle view of the prescriptive literature and they think that if we could only find the authentic prescriptions in early Sanskrit texts, then many mysteries of iconography would be cleared up. But it is my impression after trying to find these things that the prescriptive literature more often than not, it's very interesting in its own right but doesn't actually illuminate very much the iconography that we find, particularly in early centuries. Yes. So, what are the things we do not find in Cambodia very much. Fierce goddesses, Degence alluded to this in the summary that I referred to earlier. So, in many parts of South India, particularly the Bengal Bengal and the East, and to some extent from now do we find a lot of various fierce ladies who are goddesses. I'm here at one, often called Cha Munda, but there again we have a whole range of possible names, Chandika and many, many more. If you look at the words that I have referred to, Bihari Sarkar, Yuko Yokochi and Shala Chvet will see quite a range of possible names. And here she is described by the Kirna and she belongs to a set of Satamakri, let's say the seven mothers. In Tamil Nadu, they're often called seven virgins of the Kanyak because they're never shown with children. And this is something that is very rare in Cambodia. So Degence alluded to that. Here we find plenty of instances in South India. This is part of a sequence, difficult to get them all in. And just to show you rather different conventions of possible for representing the fiercest of them as Cha Munda. In fact, there's one sequence that Degence was not, I think, aware of in his list of 10th century representations in Cambodia. And here I think that this must be such a sequence we have other people who suggested this too. Brahmi is usually the first in the sequence and we find her here to the right of the door of the southeast tower of the quincunks at the top of the premier temple. And if you go around you can see if the regular order is followed then you can identify all these ladies. And the only two who seem to be distinctive iconographically are Brahmi, which I've shown you there on the left because if you look closely, she has four heads, like Brahmi. And Varahi, who has a sort of beak there looks like but it's meant to be a boar snout. But again, this is something that is a bit mysterious. Why are there so few of representations of the subtlety of Cambodia, and why are they so concentrated in the 10th century, whereas in the Indian subcontinent. We find them pretty much the lengths and breadth of subcontinent, and we find them very early periods. And we find very much interesting textual material about them I would say I mean that to say what we find doesn't seems to be relatively late when it confirms a number of seven or eight. The earlier material is very, very confusing, very varied, very various lists of names. And one of those towers on the top of Peru, as we know from the enormous great description is a tower that is dedicated to Gauri. So the Quincans clearly contained five icons. The central one must have been the linga called Rajendra Bhadrieshwara. And then there was clearly at least one Gauri, at least one Shauri and at least one other Ishwara as perhaps statues, and then probably there were four images of these three deities. So in other words, one of those deities must have been doubled, probably Shiva. So presumably, these goddesses are placed on the south of this tower because that was the tower in which Gauri was installed. And on the other towers you see male deities. Yes, very often it's a kind of rule of thumb. If you see a female Dvarapalika, that's to say a doorkeeper, then you expect to see, then the shrine probably contains the goddess. A male Dvarapalika, much more could be said about these, but I'm going quickly, usually the shrine contains a male deity. And another person, a personage who is entirely missing is Pali and the fierce goddess. At least we don't know whether she's entirely missing, but she's missing from, you might have expected to see many more if this were another comparable region of the Indian subcontinent. There are, in fact, and I'm afraid I don't have time to speak about this image at all. There are of course fierce goddesses here and there, this one in the National Museum in Cambodia in different stages of repair. But, well, there's a story about that. You can see many other deities, so this is just to illustrate one. Jayshtha is a deity you find very often in the Tamil countryside, particularly in the early period, and she is somebody not really explained by Sanskrit literature or contemporary Sanskrit literature. In search in vain, it seems, for explanations of who this lady is. And again, we don't find her in Cambodia, but in this case we don't find her anywhere else, at least not recognizably, in the Indian subcontinent. She seems to be unique to the Tamil species south, but also on the kinds of sites like this great Kailasanath temple, which are associated with royal patronage and with Sanskrit economy. Okay, one other thing which I don't think we see, and this is something that we might have been led to expect from Vihani Sarkar's study, which emphasizes this very strong link between the martial, between military activity and the goddess. I cannot see that there is any evidence particularly of this in Cambodia. In other words, we would expect might expect to see that kings in particular, and in connection, in particular with military campaigns might have installed images for goddess because the goddess is a more like goddess, and she assists military persons. So, the one possible exception to this, it occurred to me might be this inscription, I don't know what you might think those of you who are interested in the Sanskrit interpretation. The third verse there, is it there interpreted by Sedes, who connects the installation by Hava Valman of this goddess with an installation accompanied by rights which are suitable for fitting for the goddess. And this translation, Devi Yatharta Charitaiki. Well, the Sanskrit of every verse of this needs correction for interpretation, it's tricky to know what is really meant, but it just occurred to me that it's conceivable that what was meant was instead that Hava Valman managed to install this image on the basis of, in other words, using the funds acquired through his acts, Charitaiki, which were somehow in conformity with the goddess. In other words, they were part of, they were military acts conforming to the ethos which the worship of the goddess belongs to. Okay, and I think that I'm now at the conclusion. Yes. Yes. So, I really need to wrap up here. One of the things there are many things that I haven't touched on what I hope I have managed to do is to illustrate to you that the literary sources are extremely sparse. Many epigraphs have not been read. There's still many things we could find out from new discoveries. The icons are extremely difficult to identify, not simply because they are not labeled, that's the point I was about to come to this slide, but also because much of the early literature that tells us and tells our historians how we label gods and goddesses seems really not to have applied in an early period. And in addition to that one could mention that it's extremely rare to find instances where we have both a statue surviving and the epigraph that reports to describe that, not describe that, but refer to its installation. And so, although we can say that there seem to be these and those trends missing, I think that we must bear in mind that we have a lot of the information is missing, or very difficult to interpret and so one doesn't stumble on things like the punch of bindi, unless one is looking out for them and it's difficult to look out for them because one doesn't expect them to be there. This list is not a comprehensive list, it doesn't pretend to be. This is simply what I drew up while trying to prepare this lecture, a little aid memoir for myself. So I'm trying to illustrate one basic difference which I think that just pointed out that in the pre anchoring period we seem to have a lot of deities who might do guys copy line and support, and solitary ladies, and specifically associated with vision in the pre anchoring period we don't seem to have so many independent deities, and, and yet we have an increase in numbers of allusions to installation. So let me just draw attention to the differences here. On the right are the anchoring period descriptions and you can see that a very large number of these ladies are called David, which confounds any attempted identifying them when they're no further information, but in many cases we have the further information that they are with Vishnu or they are with Shambhu, and then we know that they're really essentially spouse deities. And all of these instances I've written in blue at the bottom there are instances of a goddess installed along with other images. So it is very striking in the anchoring period, pre anchoring period quite a different set, a different kettle of fish. We have some names deities we have a number of them alone. So there's ones before that I've listed the bottom these simply ladies who are by themselves. One of them 56 probably she's by herself because it's an inscription that mentions many different foundations, but they seem in each case to be associated with different cities or towns. And in some cases I would say that the information that the lady is a keboga with other dignity. So the very first one I mentioned there, we have bug in the moral which means sister of Vishnu. But the fact that she is mentioned as a keboga with different other dignity means that she the offerings made the revenue that is collected on behalf of that goddess sister of Vishnu is shared with other deities. So let me rather suggest that she too is somehow an independent goddess she is a goddess in her own right. I think that if she was simply a spouse goddess, or there simply because she's the sister of Vishnu and she's next to Vishnu if that were the case, we wouldn't specify. There would be no need to specify that her income revenue shared with other deities. And to conclude, I leave you with this bibliographical slide but to conclude, I think I hope that I have illustrated for you a number of the ways in which the, the identification of these deities is extremely difficult. And I think we very much that there is much much more that couldn't done to try and elucidate the history of goddess worship in Cambodia. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you so much for that incredibly rich lecture. I hope you are okay yourself. Close your window and you've got no electricity so yes, I might just open the window again. I wouldn't like to think of you. I don't have oxygen. Now, I'd just like to remind the participants that there is a Q&A box that you can enter text into to type your questions we already have two questions there but before we move on to that. I would like to hand over to my colleague Soka, Soka Siang, who's a third year PhD student at SOAS, researching a topic on Korean administration of the ninth and 10th centuries, a study of aristocrats and their temples to, to manage this next section of the Q&A section. Soka, please, the screen is yours. Okay, thank you, Heidi. Thank you very much, Dominic for such an interesting presentation on the subject of goddess and worshipping in ancient Cambodia. While we are waiting for people to write down the question, let me make a general remark on sure resource to kickstart the Q&A session. In Cambodia, unlike in India, local ministry of various religious and non-religious practice do not survive until today. And from the inscription, we can learn that various books were imported into ancient Cambodia. They were kept in place. There was a library at various temples. Those books were copied, but have been copied over time during at least Pyeonggol and Hongkong in Korea. They even have a place for when they are expired. The reason they do not survive until today were probably due to the material that they were made of, which could not last long time, unlike the stone inscription we found at where is my temple. Moreover, it might also be related to the chain of religion from Hinduism and Haiyanism to the Kirabadabism, which as a result make those manuscripts not relevant to Cambodia from the 15th century, which has adopted a new religious ideology. From the inscription, both Sanskrit and Khmer we have learned of various names of books, various religious practices, even statecrafts supposedly imported from India. Of course, the present term can at least allow us to assume that various books and practices from India were used in Cambodia or at least known among the Indians. But it is much more difficult to know the practical use, for example, of the religious practices in ancient Cambodia, just merely from the present alone in the inscription. We probably can assume that the practice in Cambodia is a mirror image as that in India. On the other hand, it might fall into what my first director of my museum, George Clorier, provocatively called friend colonial scholar in the early 20th century for studying Cambodia as if it was a part of India, the Hindu propagandists. And we also see other who seem to make Hindu religious aspect less important in seeing Cambodia path such as the world of victory, who focus more on socio-economical aspect. The project to study ancient Cambodia by relying, of course, on the source in Cambodia and also on the source from the outside is not only difficult but sometimes could also kind of draw criticism. Hi, that's all for my email. I think we have many questions. So let's start with is the meat of my goddess Nakisoma influenced by the synthesis between the Hindu devotion of yoga and the devotion of local goddess. For example, you know, and yes, I can see that many questions are coming which I have no idea how to answer. I think this particular one is, of course, the theme of an agony that's a female snake person who marries a Brahmin or person coming from India is not isolated. I also believe that there are a number of other instances in different regions that came under Sanskrit influence. And that is something that I don't know that there's any influence of yoga specifically in that myth. It's a myth that it recurs. I mean, it's not, it's not an isolated case. I think among South Indian dentists, you find it also. I think that Emmanuel Francis in his book may have written about that and various other people. But so my answer to that would be probably not. But maybe I could just say something about etic and emic. Of course, I very much respect and other different approaches and what Michael Vickery has contributed to Khmer scholarship is, of course, marvelous. A very, very stimulating book indeed on pre anchorian inscriptions and what they mean about what we can deduce from them about the state. I think that to that I would only say I don't really have a position where I'm trying to use Sanskrit sources and impose on Cambodia division of being a state, like all the other regions of India. I am simply contributing, trying to contribute pieces of data that I am able to comment on as a Sanskritist having never lived in Cambodia before. So, and I think that there is a lot of material, even if I'm without falling into either of those extreme ideological camps of the people who wish to see it one way or the other, to the exclusion of all other possibilities. So one can see that there is a lot of material that Sanskritists can contribute by studying the inscriptions carefully, ideally with an open mind to all the features which are specific to Cambodia. But this particular one, the Nagini theme is not actually as specific as you might imagine it as I say it has parallels in other parts of the Indian world. So let's move to the next question. This is a bit long. We just read it out at the late of the 13th century. Chandi, I'm not familiar with the name, Chandi, single sorry, temple in each hour, there are statues of Dua, Ganesha, and Agastya at the temple side were also found a retinue statue of Kamunda and poverty, all constructed during the period of King Krithana Gara who follow the sotri practice. Is it correct to associate these three saktis with the king who saw himself as both Shiva and Buddha and was depicted as Agastya. This is one of the very few known Kamunda in existence from each hour. Yes, well, I don't know about that kind of question. It's very difficult to tell. Of course, one always wants to find very specific interpretations of certain iconographical programs. At least Dua, Ganesha, Agastya. This is very common sort of set, no, in Agastya very often on the south side of the monument. And so it's tricky to try and do this, but honestly the answer is that I do not know. I didn't know that Chamunda was so rare. I thought that there were more, but so I'm sorry that I cannot answer that question. It's a very interesting question. I do not know the answer. Okay, let's start with another question. Do female Yajemana is available in India? Yes, certainly. I mean, if you mean by that ladies who install images or create temple. Yes. It's more common in Cambodia than in the Indian subcontinent. I have no idea. As you know, the data is unmasterable. I mean, that's to say there's large quantities of inscriptions, many of them are published. Even the ones that publish one cannot see them all, lots of languages. I do not know statistically. But yes, there are such figures. So the next question is, is the name with Snoop Duga tested in text or inscription, or is it a design isn't created by art history. Well, I suspect that it's not a test. I mean, I haven't found it. And I tend to put inverted commas around this and I think people use it differently. I think that means any image of Duga with Shankar and Chakra. And it's the fact that the Shankar and Chakra, which is there, that has led people to use this label. Some people specifically designates the form that I showed you from the National Museum where instead of being on a buffalo's head, there is simply some neutral open lotus or other other pinbika other pedestal. So I think the label is used differently. You sometimes see it painted on temple walls above as an identifying label, a modern identifying label above certain images. I don't think they've ever seen it in Sanskrit text. But maybe somebody else has. We have another question. This is a 7th century Duga image from some land. You know the place. Do you consider this Duga or Lakshmi idea identify Duga warrior goddess, who only hold a cons or a dish in Cambodia at this period, like in Mahabali Huram. There's a catch in this word identifiable. I don't. I mean the image that I showed from the national one of the images I showed from the National Museum in Cambodia in Phnom Penh shows a figure who is a goddess standing not on a buffalo's head and holding just conch and disk. It should be 7th century, but this and it's labeled as a good guy, but I don't know whether it's a good guy. Is it identifiable. I don't know. And I'm afraid I don't remember this image from some land. But maybe we could you could show it to me and we could correspond about it. I see also that my good Alexis Sanderson has written a question, or other more an observation could be gone down very problematic. It's a very ingenious amundation. I would think about it. Thank you. You'd like to answer the question. I don't think I can answer it exactly. I mean, so the pun to Bindi. Yes, the treatment of this in the bridge color. I'm surprised that Alexis Sanderson is familiar with it already. I think he first drew my attention to this chapter. But the physical examples well I hope that they are examples of the punch Bindi I think in the case of the Maharashtrian object that's what they are. In the case of the objects from the several objects from that pool, I still feel quite uncertain but at least it looks like a working hypothesis. And maybe if other people yourselves are now aware of this possibility that bunch of Bindi is a thing, five cannonball like things. But maybe we will start to find more such images from other places in Southeast Asia. I see that we have skipped a question from her skin. I don't really know about this. I mean, it's simply something that starts to enter in South India in I think the ninth century but I one would really like to check all the images and see at what point in fact this trend occurs. It's something that creeps in. And unfortunately, because I do not know so many other areas of the territory of the possible territory for images of goddesses and God, it's difficult to know whether this occurs outside the Tamil speaking South. There's certainly somebody here in the audience will know an answer to that question, but I do not know. It is a little bit like this critic are this, sorry, this, this is a way of holding emblems, which appears in the ninth century, again, in specifically it seems in the Tamil speaking South. It's simply a kind of convention that emerges putting wings on certain. So, we have another question a pattern man at the Israeli temple show a she was not with a small figure, which has been identified as correct. The emaciated female devotee of Shiva mentioned in medieval medieval community. This looks like the one of the figure below the South Indian statue of Janaka that you show in your presentation do you have anything to say about the transmission of this motive from South India to the kind of man. Yes, so this is indeed what I had been intending to speak about with the reference to this, both with reference to Chen Bika and with reference to another image I showed from the National Museum of Cambodia, which shows a fierce form of the goddess seated on an hour. But it's in fact something that has been elucidated by a colleague of mine Eric will do know. And I'm not sure where he has written it up, but I think that he is really definitively shown. And I think it's published but in any case he's spoken to about it. It is definitively shown that this is not car like on my young. So for a long time. This was printed in a lot of second religion. The idea that car like on my own is shown in Cambodia. But, Eric for the know has made exactly the observation that you have made and provided further proofs. And because I cannot remember exactly where he has written it up. I didn't have the time to search. I cannot find it but you could ask him in any case I think one of the proofs is visible in the image of the lady seated on an hour in the National Museum. She is holding a human head. And in some other cases you can see a miniature human body in her palm or dangling from her ears. All of this shows that this is not a human saying car like on my own but some goddess of massive super human statue is. And the notion that this is car like on my own was very romantic to be a link between Tamil literature and Southeast Asia, the kind that one doesn't expect to find and therefore very exciting. It seems to be a completely exploded miss now, although it appears in many publications. Yeah, the question why do you think the popularity of that was shipping in smaller and smaller and later sent. And, Well, that's. It's a very interesting question. I mean I think that what it's what does I think in the last words that I quoted from his book about the possibility that the worship of seven markets was linked to their being seated as violent. It may be the kernel of an answer and it may be that there is less taste for various fierce mother goddesses in among the commands I think some of these things are a matter of taste. I think that we see, for instance, in cyber iconography that there are certain regions of the whole Sanskrit area where it's very popular to represent Shiva, not only with lots of sanguinary attributes but also if you fall it with an erect penis. There are other areas like in South India, for example, where you never, never see Shiva, a representation of any form of Shiva it seems with an erect penis. Whereas in Bengal you will see this even for such a mild and unsexualized form as Sadashiva, you can find Sadashiva with an erect palace. In other words, it may be a question of taste. There are simply other religious tastes which are there and gradually develop. But every kind of possible responses there I think one of the difficulties that we have for the is a sort of imbalance in material. We do not have, there are certain periods which we really don't have very much evidence and for the Angkorian period at least we can see that there really are a lot of goddesses but they always seem to be with other deities. And I think that that suggests that indeed there is sort of diminution of goddess worship but it doesn't have to suggest it, it's not clear. To what extent does the disjunct between material culture and textual source apply not just to Cambodia but to iconography in South Asia more broadly. Yes, so this is something I had meant to say thank you for pointing this out. I had meant to say that I think I started to say it, but there is indeed a big disconnect. And one of the reasons why I'm referring at all to Shiva tantric sources to describe, to try and describe, to show passages of iconographical description that related to goddess who appears to be Vaishnava affiliated, is that that's one of the earlier places where one can look because there are iconographical bits in these texts. But why is there no independent surviving body of knowledge about goddess? Well, the dates from a completely early period. It may be that it's lost. It may be that it was never produced. There are some different possible answers there. I think one of the things that we see in South India and it's something I wanted to suggest by the mention of the goddess Jishthak and the mention of the seven markets is that the seem to be traditions of worship which are very strong vigorous among people and end up producing a lot of sculptures, but not traditions which attract the kind of priestly culture. So a lot of what we have surviving at least for the South Indian body of textile material looks as though it might have been produced with the concerns of a priestly class, a South Indian priest in mind. Sometimes it mentions also other caste communities or communities, for instance, the ladies who dance or the musicians or certain kinds of craftsmen. And one has the feeling that a lot of this literature is produced with very much with their in order to ratify what they do, what they contribute to large South Indian temples. If you have a vigorous independent goddess worship tradition where there is no need for a priest who is Brahmin and set apart from the rest of society by his learning to officiate. If it is a vigorous tradition where people go themselves, or they might have a priest but he's a priest who comes from another kind of community not necessarily a very literary community, then you might never generate a body of descriptive literature which explains why it is that Jaysthar, for example, is flanked by a lady on one side and a man with a bull's head on the other side. And this is something for which we do not find, as far as I'm aware, explanation in any sense. So we have a large number of hundreds of representations from seven, eight, nine, 10 centuries of this Jaysthar lady, very often with these two figures on either side almost always. And we can see certain attributes, we can read them, the crow is there, and the broom, so she's swept. But as far as I'm aware, no work, no line of early Sanskrit prescriptive literature which tells us how to produce it. And part of the disjunct that we see in Cambodia to answer your question between material cultural and textual sources is exactly the same disjunct in four different areas of India, same problem. It seems that we don't have another question. I have a question. Your friend, Schmidt, seemed to associate Durga, Mehesa, Sauram, Madini with Weiss Navi, rather than Saiva. What do you think about Durga, Mehesa, Sauram, Madini in Cambodia? I think that her observation is absolutely spot on. I think that if you start to look at early shrines in different parts of India, you can see that there is this association. So for example, in the caves in Mahabalipuram, there's a very celebrated high-release sculpture showing the goddess battling with the demon, the buffalo demon, Mahishaswara. And opposite her is another large, magnificent high-release sculpture of Vishnu lying on the cosmic serpent Ananda. And it's very clear, and many people have pointed out that the cave in question has been redesigned in the Palava period to be a Saiva cave, but in origin it's a Vaishana cave. But quite apart from that, there is the evidence of the emblems themselves, the Shankar and Chakra, which I was showing, closely associated with the goddess in Cambodia also at an early period. And then this surviving through the centuries in the Tamil-speaking south, for example, as a kind of memory of this close association with Vishnu, even though more and more people begin to associate the goddess with Shiva. So I think that Charlotte Schmidt's observations are very useful and explain why we have this Shankar and Chakra as a standard feature part of the iconography of all these warrior goddesses on the northern face of Saiva temples in South India. In Cambodia I don't know, because I haven't seen nearly enough images of Cambodian images to know, but I don't know how many images there are of later periods. I mean, as Deja seems to observe, while we see lots of references in epigraphy to the continuing of insulation of deities, particularly female spouse deities, we don't seem to have that many images surviving. And maybe the last slide I showed seems to imply also that the representation of solitary deities, particularly Mahinshasa and Mahindukha, is one such figure, is rather common, is not common, but is there in the pre-ankorian period and not really evident so much in the Angkorian period. We have another question. I wonder if you might speak a bit more about what might be taken to be a sort of mirroring of social structure in the spousal and independent goddess. I'm thinking both about the respectively attendant character traits, supportive, beautiful, gentle, fierce, but also about the financial dimension you allude to having independent revenue or not. My question is perhaps best thought in the context of what are often assumed to be different social structure between the subcontinent and Cambodian. Yes. Okay, so that's a very rich and complicated question. I don't know whether I can say anything very intelligent about that. But one thing that, and I have much more awareness of what happens in South India. As I think I said that when you look at a plan of a South Indian temple, you can see that from the 12th, 13th century onwards, increasingly we get the addition of south facing positioned spouse shrines besides Shiva temples. And indeed the entire pantheon, I showed you on one slide, rings of deities around Sadashiva, and all of those deities in some later tech class spouses. It's as though suddenly there's some kind of social posture, which means that everybody has to be married. And which doesn't seem to be evident or didn't act in the same way before a certain theory. So clearly in South India, there is a very strong pattern of marrying, not just all sorts of people, but all the gods and goddesses seem to get married. But in the case of the goddess, there's some very particular dynamic which is not just us, which no doubt is partly social, but there is a feeling that the independent goddess, this fierce free woman, this lady cannot be married because you cannot be fierce free, if you are a woman. I mean, of course, it is possible in any society but there are certain figures only who have certain freedom of property and, and we can see that rudra in the tech class, but to say courtesans attached to the temple dances are people who make donations, but queens and widowed rich ladies, but on the whole, most women of certain status are not so prominent, except in these roles in donors. And so, I suppose that a spouse female deity fits into the social fabric very naturally because women marry. Of course, men do too, but women, their, their whole world is defined by the husband or their father, some male figure in theory at least is supposed to control the decisions in their lives. And then, but then there are these fierce free other women. And so the goddess is somehow split into two, all the time there are myths which explain how these two parts are related they divide all the students. But I suppose that it must. It must be a reflection of this very strong tension in society. Women are controlled married, but there is this other possibility there represented by the goddess, but I don't know I have the feeling that somebody else who thinks about this more like behind me. So car would be able to answer this question better and I cannot answer the Cambodian side of things, but it does look from the evidence that I quoted at the end which is not. It's not exactly built together but it does look as though in the Angkorian period, typically, the goddesses are spouses, rather like to somehow seeming to mirror what happens in South India with this, with spouses all over the place attached to other deity. Dominic thank you so much for that. I think this is a really good place to to to finish this question of women and I'm sure as you suggested earlier on that we could we could carry on several more of these webinars unpacking all these different strands of thoughts and ideas. Thank you for all our participants today for asking such great questions. Thank you, Dominic again for this incredibly rich lecture and thank you so car for your response and for handling the questions. Thank you to my team, Anna and the team for putting this lecture together today. Before I go. I just like to remind you all that on the 17th of March we'll be holding our next lecture at 11am Angkor Wat Cambodia a trans cultural history of heritage by Michael Folser. So please don't forget to to to register in advance. And if you're interested in seeing the recording of this lecture. I've posted a URL actually not in the Q&A box in the chat box, but you can find it on the website, the SOAS website where you registered for this, this lecture. So thank you one and all again and hope to see you again soon. Thank you so much indeed. Thank you.