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 most of them were written in Sanskrit, with a small corpus of less than 400 inscriptions in Champ language, most of which haven't been completely deciphered today.

I know this because I just came across a recent publication about these inscriptions, where the author, Arlo Griffiths, from the monumental École Française d'Extrême-Orient, presents some surprising hors d'oeuvres of them. In his article "Documenting and Describing a Language on the Basis of an epigraphic Corpus: The case of Old Cham (Present Vietnam, 500-1500 ce)", Griffith exposes some of these inscriptions, their transcriptions and translations. His interpretations, based on modern Cham, Malay (a cognate language) and Sanskrit, seem groundbreaking and leave you with a loud appetite for more. 

While most of his examples provide testimony of offerings to the gods, there is one I found fascinating: precisely the oldest Cham text, inscription C. 174, written in 4-5th AD in Quảng Nam province. This inscription bears the magic powers of declarative speech acts, this utterances that have the faculty to change reality. Just as a priest pronounces two people married, a judge declares someone innocent, a a father proclaims his child grounded, or a boss fires an employer with words, this inscription is invested with the power of changing your life in the worst possible way: with a curse. 

The three lines in the text contain three declaratives: two blessings and a curse. I beg the author to forgive my audacious sin of freely interpreting his translation. The good angel in my conscience says "How dare you, ignorant and disrespectful shit, to mingle into the affairs of real specialists?" But the little devil on my other shoulder shouts "Come on, brave linguist, it is just for the sake of fun and popularization!" Dear reader, be aware that this is just a free interpretation, based on linguistic intuitions, of a serious work that you can find in Aussant & Simon (2022): 61. Without further captatio benevolentiae, our two blessings and a curse:

Glory to the divine serpent Puñ the king.

People who are gentle to Him shall not fall from heaven. 

People who insult Him, a thousand years they will suffer from fever in hell with their seven generations of descendants.

(Griffith 2022: 61)

Declaratives change the world, but written declaratives have a second power: they defy time -verba volant, scripta mangent. They also stand by themselves, free from the control of the author. We can guess, but we do not know who is cursing you, just as we don't often know who forbids to open a door or to walk on the grass in prohibition signs. But this inscription does not forbid anything; it blesses and curses you, incautious reader, like a video tape that curses the naive viewer.

Source: Griffith (2022), Etudes du Corpus des inscriptions du Campā, XIII. Documenting and Describing a Language on the Basis off an epigraphic Corpus: The case of Old Cham (Present Vietnam, 500-1500 ce), in Aussant & Simon, Documenter et décrire les langues d'Asie Histoire et épistémologie. SHESL, Paris.