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THE EARLY CAMBODIA LITERATURE
From the earliest times in Cambodia, epic poems and folk tales were transmitted orally; spontaneous literature of this type may still be found today amongst certain ethnic minority communities of the north and north east of the country.
The earliest written works took the form of Sanskrit verses inscribed on palm leaf manuscripts during the Angkorian era (9th-13th centuries). By the 11th century Buddhist treatises and jataka were being produced on a regular basis.
The oldest work written in Khmer is the Reamker, the Cambodian version of the ancient Ramayana epic, which appears on bas-reliefs and frescos at temples and pagodas throughout the country. For centuries it has provided the raw material for many traditional performance genres and it is taught in high schools to this day. The earliest extant versions of the Reamker date from the 16th to the 18th centuries, though these are believed to originate from manuscripts of the early Angkorian era.
From the 17th century onwards poems known as chbap (‘codes of conduct’) were written by Buddhist monks to teach novices about morality. These poems, written in the precise metre demanded of Khmer poetry with colourful compounds and complex rhyme patterns, subsequently became set texts in wat schools. The same period also witnessed the appearance of satra lbaeng (‘works for pleasure’), lengthy verse-novels which recounted the ancient jataka stories.
Some of these works, written on palm-leaf manuscripts, were cleaned and microfilmed with aid funding for the National Library in the early 1990s.
Many popular folktales were not formally recorded, but are well-remembered and re-told, These include stories with a moral, animal tales such as those about Judge Rabbit, traditional riddles and sayings. From the 1950s to the 1970s some of these were collected and published by the Buddhist Institute, and more recently some NGOs have also produced illustrated versions of the old stories for children.
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