After a brief survey of the present state of studies on the Cambodian inscriptions – not forgetting recent literature in German –, and of the ‘Corpus des inscriptions khmères’ programme, the concrete case of the inscription of Prasat Kompul Ta Non (Cambodia, province of Takeo, near the Phnom Bayang) will be taken up. The inscription of twenty-one lines in Sanskrit (18 anuṣṭubh, 1 prthvī, 1 āryā), plus nine – fragmentary – lines in Old Khmer, demonstrates some important points as to what is urgent in these studies. It further allows us to revive a king (Jayavarman I bis), whom Cambodian historiography tended to suppress to the benefit of Jayavarman II. The stanzas in Sanskrit also have an aesthetic value; the Khmer portion is fragmentary to the extent that it is hardly understandable, but it may be interesting to see the large number of words taken from Sanskrit.
