The Thai king credited with inventing the alphabet may have only tweaked it
Thai schoolchildren learn that King Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai created their alphabet, and his portrait on the 20 baht note honours the feat. Historians read his famous stone inscription more cautiously. Tai had already been written in borrowed scripts for up to two centuries; his innovation may have been putting vowels on the line.
Ramkhamhaeng was the third king of the Phra Ruang dynasty and ruled the Sukhothai Kingdom from 1279 to 1298, its most prosperous period. Folk legend made his parents an ogress and a fisherman, but he was the son of King Si Inthrathit. His name, Rama the Bold, reportedly came from a victory on elephant-back at 19 over the ruler of Mueang Chot. He succeeded his brother Ban Mueang, and one historian ties his accession to 1279, the year he planted a sugar palm in Sukhothai, perhaps following a custom of planting a tree at coronation.
His main source is a stele inscribed in 1292, now in the Bangkok National Museum and listed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register since 2003. It reads partly as a warrior's memoir of raids that carried off elephants, silver and gold, and partly as an advertisement: anyone could trade elephants, horses, silver or gold in Sukhothai. It credits him with devising Tai letters, but David Wyatt notes it claims only these particular letters, and Hans Penth argued Tai had long been written in South Indian, Mon and Khmer scripts.
Claims about the size of his realm, from Vientiane to the Bay of Bengal, should be read loosely, since kingdoms in Southeast Asia then had no fixed borders and centred on the strength of their capital. He sent embassies to Yuan China from 1282 and is credited with founding the Sangkhalok ceramic trade that later exported to Japan and the Philippines, though some scholars place that technology a century later.
One episode reached beyond Siam. His daughter eloped with a commoner who captained the palace guard; that man founded the Hanthawaddy kingdom in Burma and commissioned the Code of Wareru, used as a basis for law in Siam until 1908. Chinese records date his death to 1298. His name lives on in Ramkhamhaeng University, Thailand's first open-admission university, and he appears as a playable ruler in Civilization V.
Source: Ramkhamhaeng
