ABSTRACT
The stone inscriptions of this period have a totally different character from those of the ancient kingdom. As in the Angkorean epoch, most such inscriptions were created to record some act of merit: the freeing of slaves, the repairing of statues, or the offering of material goods to the local community of monks. But where the inscribers of Angkor distinguished sharply between texts in elaborate Sanskrit poetry and texts in terse Khmer prose, their Middle Period successors wrote in a uniform literary Khmer prose style which combined the expression of religious zeal with the provision of mundane information.5 Some of these later inscriptions were written in person by members of the royal family, some by less eminent officials; not a few contain details of the personal lives of the writer or of the historical events of his time.
