Two blessings and a curse: the oldest inscription in Old Cham (Vietnam, 3rd - 4th c. AD)
If you travelled to Vietnam you may have included in your visit one of the archeological sites of the Champa people, the Champs -once the main ethnic group in Southern Vietnam, roughly from 2nd to 17th c. AD. If you decided to include the Champ archeological site of Mỹ Sơn in your trip, you probably regretted not staying in the beach and going to sweat your soul out in a field of ruins under the punishing sun of the tropics. Probably no one told you that these people were Austronesian, like the aboriginals in Taiwan and many of the islands of South East Asia and Oceania. Maybe you heard about them when you visited the temples of Angkor in Cambodia -You may have read in your travel guide that some temples in Angkor Wat, like the Bayon, were built to celebrate the victory of the Khmer upon the invading Champs. And most likely you didn't pay much attention to the Champ inscriptions in the museum, written in a beautiful but inaccessible brahmi script. So surely you didn't know that...
