Sivaskandavarman Performs the Ashvamedha and Grants Land to Brahmins at Kanchipuram

Roughly two hundred years after Hinduism reached Cambodia with the Kingdom of Funan around 100, already recorded here, and roughly eighty years before King Bhadravarman founded the My Son sanctuary in Champa in 380, also recorded here, the Pallava king Sivaskandavarman, ruling from his capital at Kanchipura in the far south of India, issued the Prakrit copper plate charters known today as the Mayidavolu and Hirahadagalli grants. The Hirahadagalli plate, issued in his eighth regnal year, records that he had performed the Vajapeya, Agnishtoma and Ashvamedha, the horse sacrifice that only a sovereign of unchallenged rank could claim, and styles him dharma maharajadhiraja, great king of kings devoted to dharma, after his dynasty's rise on the ruins of the earlier Ikshvaku kingdom. The same charters grant villages and garden land to named Brahmins and confirm earlier grants made by his father, exempting the land from the ordinary dues of a Pallava province in a formula that became the standard shape of the brahmadeya land grant across the peninsula for centuries afterward. Scholars disagree sharply on when Sivaskandavarman reigned, proposals ranging from the late third century to the mid fourth, but every dating sits inside the same span separating Hinduism's documented arrival in Cambodia from its establishment in Champa, and the mechanism his charters describe, a Sanskritic royal cult sustained by Vedic sacrifice and land granted to Brahmins, is the same mechanism that carried Hindu kingship across the very seas Funan and Champa were built on.