Prathivindravarman

Prathivindravarman emerges as a ruler conventionally placed in the mid-5th or mid-6th century through the testimony of the Wang Pai Inscription (K.978), which identifies him as the ruler of Si Thep, The inscription, inscribed in Sanskrit with Pallava script, discovered approximately 10 kilometers north of Si Thep, was composed to commemorate the coronation of a king described as the grandson of a Cakravartin and the son of King Prathivindravarman, whose power is explicitly compared to that of King Bhavavarman I or Bhavavarman II or another Bhavavarman.

This ambiguity has generated sustained scholarly debate, particularly concerning the dynastic relationships implied by the text. Earlier historiographical traditions identify Bhavavarman I as the biological son of Vīravarman. More recent interpretations, however, propose that Vīravarman may instead have been Bhavavarman I’s stepfather, having married the widowed queen of Prathivindravarman. Under this reconstruction, Bhavavarman I would be understood as the biological son of Prathivindravarman and the adopted son of Vīravarman, a scenario that repositions Prathivindravarman as the foundational progenitor of this royal lineage. This reconstruction depends on treating Prathivindravarman's own son as Bhavavarman I; if instead, as argued below, the Wang Pai king was a separate local ruler, Vīravarman's paternity of Bhavavarman I would stand without requiring a stepfather arrangement, consistent with the Wat Ban Khwao inscription, which names Vīravarman as father of both Bhavavarman I and Mahendravarman. Anurak Depimai has supported this redating and argued further that the king cannot have been Bhavavarman II either, since the Wat Kud Tae inscription identifies Bhavavarman II as a son of Isanavarman I rather than of Prathivindravarman; on this reading the Wang Pai king was most plausibly a local ruler of Si Thep who adopted Chenla-style royal titulature. Depimai likewise considers it unlikely that the king was the later, largely conjectural Bhavavarman III proposed by Claude Jacques for the period of Chenla's division into "Land Chenla" and "Water Chenla" (roughly the early-to-mid 8th century), a period considerably later than the inscription's redated script.