I have recently been reading through the corpus of inscriptions issued during the reign of Jayavarman VII. In the inscription of Preah Khan (K. 908), there is a fascinating verse praising the king’s magnanimity after victory in battle. George Cœdès edited the verse as follows:

○ prottuṅgasaudhavilasadripurājarāja
dhānīs svavīri avahe rivanaṃ mṛgeṣu
śaṅke ‘diśat svavanavāsiṣu yas svadāvaṃ
yuddhāhṛteṣu samatāṃ prathayan vadanyaḥ

There is evidently a problem with svavīri avahe, which I suspect can only be a typo. Surprisingly, the mistake was reproduced by Thomas S. Maxwell in his 2007 version of the text, which accompanies his richly annotated translation. Fortunately for us, Cœdès included images of this inscription’s estampage. Here is the verse in question:

I find it slightly easier to read when the colours are inverted:

I’m still a novice at reading the script of this period, but I think we can safely say that the stone reads svavīranivahe. And indeed this is the word reflected in Cœdès’s own French translation:

A la multitude de ses guerriers, il assigna les capitales des rois ennemis où brillaient des palais élevés; aux bêtes hantant ses propres forêts, il assigna la forêt de l’ennemi; aux prisonniers de guerre il assigna ses propres forêts, manifestant ainsi, semble-t-il, son équité et sa générosité.

I would render the verse into English as follows:

I suspect (śaṅke) this (yas) generous one (vadanyaḥ = vadānyaḥ), displaying his equity (samatā), assigned the capitals of enemy kings (ripurāja), glittering with lofty palaces, to his own host of heroes (svavīranivahe); his enemy’s forests to wild animals; and his own forest to war captives.

The king’s generosity seems to lie in his decision to share the spoils of war with his personnel rather than hoarding them, and to settle enemies in his forests rather than annihilating them. But the king and kingdom also stood to gain from this policy: increasing the number of forest dwellers secured the extraction of wax, resins, elephant tusks, and so forth, commodities that fuelled the Angkorian economy.