storyThe Mangrai law, 1296

มังรายศาสตร์ · mangrai sat

The oldest written muay is in a Lanna palm-leaf law code, filed under quarrels.

กสิณธร ราชโอรส · CC BY-SA 4.0

What it is

The oldest law code of Lanna, compiled from the Indian Dharmaśāstra, in 27 sections. The English article on muay thai names it as the oldest recorded use of the word muay, in section seven, among eighteen kinds of quarrel.

The long version

Dated 1296, in the reign of Mangrai, who founded Chiang Mai four years earlier. Written in Northern Thai on palm leaf.

Its other sections say what kind of document it is: deserting a battle, dying in the middle of a battlefield, fighting a war and coming back with an enemy's head or without one, the death of a minister. It is a war-state's code.

Inference — and muay appears in it not as an art or a display but under quarrels — one of eighteen ways people get into a fight that the law then has to sort out. That is the earliest thing anyone can point to in writing, and it describes the sport as a public order problem in a northern kingdom.

Every founding story on this site is later, southern, and better dressed.

Connected to

• muay The word itself.
• Lanna Whose law.
• The hermit's school The softer claim.
• How old is any of this What came later.

Named here by

• The hermit's school The harder evidence.
• Lanna The law.

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