Sri Naw Nam Thum () was a Tai ruler of the late 12th and early 13th centuries. The Wat Si Chum Inscription names him as lord of Sukhothai and of Si Satchanalai, which accounts of him identify with Mueang Chaliang. He is generally taken to have been a nobleman of Chaliang who built his position through his son Pha Mueang, ruler of Mueang Rat (). It rested also on Pha Mueang's marriage to , whom Coedès described as a princess under the suzerainty of the Angkorian monarch Jayavarman VII.

Father and son took Sukhothai from its Mon ruler E Daeng Phloeng, after which Sri Naw Nam Thum held both cities. His rule there was brief. He was displaced by Khom Sabat Khlon Lamphong, and the two towns passed to Bang Klang Hao only in 1238, when Pha Mueang installed him as Si Inthrathit. A popular account traces the Tai Lueang of the lower north, among whom Pha Mueang's line stood, to migrants from the Red River basin. Readings of the damaged inscription differ on where Sri Naw Nam Thum's seat lay, on whether he ruled or built the two cities, and on whether his first campaign against Sukhothai succeeded.

Origins and the Tai Lueang

A popular account of the Sukhothai dialect is reproduced at length in a 2023 study of its use in song. It holds that the ancestors of the Phra Ruang house may have come from the Red River basin in present-day Vietnam. On that account they moved through the Pa Sak valley at Phetchabun and settled in the Yom and Nan basins, where Pha Mueang's line stood. The Tai Lueang () of the lower north are said to descend from them. It refers the reader for the argument to an earlier paper by Wilaiwan Khanittanan. Khanittanan, who argues that the Tai of early Sukhothai came from the Red River basin, reports "lueang" () there as a surname among Muong and Black Tai families that performed ritual at village and mueang level. The same account reads the Sukhothai oath inscription , which it also calls , as recording kinship between the Tai Lueang of Sukhothai and the Tai Kao of Nan, at Pua. The two lines are there traced to the same ancestral spirits.

This reconstruction is consistent with the placement by the Japanese scholar Tatsuo Hoshino of the Cān Bàn Kingdom in the upper Pa Sak basin, which he identified as Tai-speaking. He links that polity to Chenla, and later to Angkor, by royal intermarriage from the 7th century.

On the same account Nan passed under Tai Yuan Lan Na and was absorbed culturally in the reign of Tilokaraj (r. 1441–1487). The Tai Lueang are also held to have lost their separate identity at that point.

Rule at Chaliang and Sukhothai

Chaliang and the taking of Sukhothai

Sri Naw Nam Thum is believed to have succeeded the weakened Rajadhiraj II of the Mon Haripuñjaya dynasty at Chaliang, probably early in the 13th century. Baker and Pasuk describe him rather as a warrior chief who raided across the upper Chao Phraya basin in the early 13th century.

In 1219 Sri Naw Nam Thum and Pha Mueang campaigned southward and took Sukhothai, overthrowing its Mon ruler E Daeng Phloeng. Some accounts place the event as early as the late 1170s. He thereafter governed Sukhothai and Chaliang together. Chit Phumisak read the same passage differently on two points. He took the campaign to have failed, the city holding out, which on his account is why a second campaign under Pha Mueang and Bang Klang Hao was needed. He also read E Daeng Phu Loeng () as the name of the elephant fought in the encounter rather than as the name of a ruler, the surviving phrase describing an elephant driven at the city gate. Baker and Pasuk read the same inscription as having Sri Naw Nam Thum gain control of Sukhothai by an elephant duel with a Mon. He then ruled it together with Si Satchanalai, built a great stupa there, and lost both towns.

Displacement and succession

His rule at Sukhothai was short. He was displaced by Khom Sabat Khlon Lamphong, who is thought either to have come from Lavo or to have been a relative of Sri Naw Nam Thum with close Lavo connections. Phiset Jiajanphong reads the inscription differently, as having Sukhothai pass to Khom Sabat Khlon Lamphong on Sri Naw Nam Thum's death rather than through his removal. Lavo had passed under the influence of the Angkorian Mahidharapura line by the 1180s. In the same period the Phraek Si Racha region south of Sukhothai passed to a royal house for which dynastic connections with the Mahidharapura line have been proposed, and was reorganised as Chen Li Fu. Walailak Songsiri argues that this polity remained autonomous rather than falling under Angkorian control, in contrast to Lavo.

After his father's displacement, Pha Mueang allied with Bang Klang Hao and took the two towns in 1238, whereupon Bang Klang Hao took the throne of Sukhothai and Chaliang as Si Inthrathit. Si Inthrathit married , a daughter of Sri Naw Nam Thum, joining the Tai Lueang line to a house that the Ayutthaya Testimonies trace instead to the indigenous line of the Padumasuriyavamsa.

A third member of the family, Phaya Khamhaeng Phra Ram, ruled Sralwang Songkhwae, modern Phitsanulok. The Wat Si Chum Inscription makes him either a younger brother of Pha Mueang or his son, so either a son or a grandson of Sri Naw Nam Thum.

Readings of the Wat Si Chum Inscription

Chusak Satienpattanodom takes the Wat Si Chum Inscription to say only that Sri Naw Nam Thum reigned in two nakhon, Si Satchanalai and Sukhothai, and gives no year for any event of his reign. On his reading Chaliang and Si Satchanalai are successive centres rather than two names for one place. The older settlement lay at Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat, and the walled city about 2 km upstream was founded late in the 13th century. He notes that the Wat Si Chum inscription names the two separately in a single text. Michael Vickery took that separation to mean two distinct places, and put Si Satchanalai at a deserted site about 20 km south of the city on the Yom. He also pointed out that the verb "ruled" in the passage on the two cities comes from a new reading of the inscription made at a seminar in 1980, where the older reading had "built". He found the circumstances of that new reading partly unconvincing, while noting that it supported his own case. Sujit Wongthes noted in 1983 that the inscription does not call him the founder of Sukhothai. He nonetheless read him as ruling Chaliang first and then building up the settlement below Khao Luang into the town of Sukhothai. On that reading he was its first king.

The passage of the Wat Si Chum Inscription giving the extent of Sri Naw Nam Thum's territory is damaged, and only the bearings and distances survive. Chit Phumisak read the surviving clause as fixing the south-western limit at Mueang Chot, a little over twenty thousand wa away. He took nairukdi () as Sanskrit nairṛti, the south-west, and phayam () as vyāma, a fathom. On that reading Sri Naw Nam Thum's seat lay north-west of Mueang Chot rather than at Chaliang, and Chit placed it in the north of present Tak province, perhaps near .

He stressed that hua non (, "head of the sleeper") denotes the south in Sukhothai inscriptions and tin non (, "feet of the sleeper") the north, the reverse of what the words suggest. He compared the Khmer terms for the two directions, which use the same figure. The southern limit of two hundred thousand wa, about 400 km, would then make the territory a strip running down the west bank of the Ping into the Mae Klong basin, along what is now the western frontier.

See also Pha Mueang Si Inthrathit Wat Si Chum Inscription

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