Sai Thong Som

Sai Thong Som is described in the Legend of the Arhat (, ) as a ruler of Dvaravati's Devapura , also called Rajgir , a place modern scholarship associates variously with Nakhon Pathom, Ratchaburi or Khu Bua. Intermarriage between the Mon dynasty of Dvaravati and Tai elites is placed within that expansion.

Later reign

No record survives of Sai Thong Som's immediate successor. Archaeological and textual evidence indicates that by the early 8th century, within the span of his reign, the political predominance of Dvaravati had begun to decline. The seat is nonetheless attested after that point in the epigraphic record, under the name Sambuka: the Lopburi inscription K.577, of about the 8th–9th century, names its donor Arushva, chief of the people of Tangura, as the son of the king of Sambuka. That centre is placed by several scholars at Nakhon Pathom. The inscription leaves the king unnamed, and no study has proposed a connection with Sai Thong Som or with any other named ruler.

One account of that decline places the initiative outside the Menam basin. Hiram Woodward, who situates Si Thep within the polity known to the Tang court as Wen Dan, has proposed that a Si Thep powerful enough to dominate the 8th century may have exercised some control over Nakhon Pathom together with Lopburi, U Thong and Khu Bua, and has asked whether central Dvaravati should accordingly be understood as having pre- and post-Wen Dan phases. He offers an alternative in which Dvaravati features at Si Thep resulted from a peaceful movement of monks rather than from conquest, and presents the whole as a possibility rather than a finding.

Ancestry