Khom Sabat Khlon Lamphong () was a 13th-century ruler of Sukhothai and Si Satchanalai, known almost entirely from the Wat Si Chum Inscription. He succeeded Sri Naw Nam Thum and was deposed in 1238 by Si Inthrathit of Mueang Bang Yang and Pha Mueang of Mueang Rat, and Si Inthrathit took the throne. Wyatt dates the deposition to about 1243.
Chusak Satienpattanodom, whose account of the episode rests on the same inscription, names him as holding both cities but gives him no origin, no rank and no year. His identity is unsettled, and the question turns largely on how his name is read. Earlier scholarship treated it as an official title and took him for a Khmer noble appointed by Angkor to administer the region. More recent work analyses it instead as a descriptive epithet referring to a physical condition, and proposes that he was a kinsman of Sri Naw Nam Thum whose political affiliations ran to Lavo rather than to Angkor. On the epithet reading he has been identified with the legendary Thao Saen Pom.
The overthrow of 1238 has conventionally been treated as the founding moment of the early Siamese polity, although several records indicate that Siamese rulers had exercised authority over Sukhothai before that date. If the identification with Thao Saen Pom is accepted, the events of 1238 would represent a contest between different branches of the same ruling family, rather than the expulsion of a foreign governor.
Name The name has been analysed through the Surin Khmer dialect, in which it reads as a description of a person marked by numerous nodules on the skin rather than as an official designation. On this analysis it divides into three elements. Khom denotes a Khom person. Sabat Khlon combines sabat, reconstructed in Old Siamese–Khmer phonology as sbaek (), "skin" or "surface", with khlon, reconstructed as khluon () or khluan (), "body" or "form", giving the sense "skin of the body". Lamphong, reconstructed as lampuong (), carries either the sense of a protrusion or small swelling on a surface, or the name of a climbing plant bearing small round edible fruits, dark green when unripe and black when ripe.
Read together, the elements yield an epithet describing a man whose skin was covered in small swellings, rather than a rank or office. That result carries two consequences. It removes the principal ground for reading the name as an Angkorian title, since on the analysis no element of it denotes a rank. It also corresponds closely to the epithet of Thao Saen Pom, "lord of a hundred thousand nodules", which is the basis of the proposed identification between the two figures. The referent of Khom () is itself contested and does not reliably denote a Khmer identity, so the first element carries less weight as an ethnic marker than the older reading assumed. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, writing in 2017, give the phrase as a Khmer-style title rather than an epithet, and spell it khom sabatkhlon lamphong. Wyatt gives the name as Khloñ Lamphang, without the first two elements, and calls him a valiant Khmer in one passage and the valiant Khōm in another.
Reign and overthrow Khom Sabat Khlon Lamphong succeeded Sri Naw Nam Thum as ruler of Sukhothai and Si Satchanalai, either on the latter's death or by displacing him; the sources do not settle which. Nothing survives of his administration beyond the fact of his holding the two towns together, an arrangement his predecessor had also maintained. In Baker and Pasuk's rendering the inscription describes him as a "valiant" person holding a Khmer-style title. David K. Wyatt likewise finds the inscription's only reference to him mostly respectful, and reads Si Inthrathit and Pha Mueang as acting on home ground rather than as invaders turning out an alien power.
In 1238 he was deposed by a coalition led by Si Inthrathit, ruler of Mueang Bang Yang and son of Candraraja, acting with Pha Mueang, a Tai Lueang () ruler of Mueang Rat, whose location is disputed. Chit Phumisak read the inscription as setting the campaign out in stages. On his reading the two allies advanced by separate routes and Khom Sabat Khlon Lamphong counter-attacked to retake Si Satchanalai. In a final action the allies mustered, performed a rite riding a single elephant's neck together, and caught him between them. He further read the phrase describing the outcome as rather than , giving the sense that Khom Sabat Khlon Lamphong withdrew into the forest rather than that his force was broken. On that reading he was a rival driven out, not a garrison destroyed.
Si Inthrathit was enthroned in his place, and the episode has conventionally been read in historiography as the formal inception of the early Siamese polity. That reading has been qualified, since several records place Siamese authority over Sukhothai before 1238. On that view 1238 marks a change of ruler within a region already under Siamese control rather than the beginning of Siamese rule there.
Identity Almost nothing is recorded of him outside the account of his defeat, so his identity has been argued from his name and from a figure in another tradition who resembles him. Two lines of argument run in parallel. One asks whether he was an Angkorian appointee or a local ruler. The other identifies him with Thao Saen Pom.
Angkorian official or local ruler The older interpretation held that he was a Khmer noble sent out from Angkor to govern the region on its behalf. It rested on two supports, the reading of his name as an official title and the wider assumption that the central and northern basins were administered from Angkor before the rise of Sukhothai. On that reading his removal in 1238 was the expulsion of a foreign governor, which is what made the date serviceable as a founding moment. In the reading of Griswold and Prasert na Nagara he becomes the commander of a Khmer garrison. The events of 1238 then become the liberation of Sukhothai from Khmer suzerainty and the establishment of an independent kingdom under a Tai dynasty.
More recent work has withdrawn both supports. The etymological analysis finds no element of rank in the name, and the term Khom is not a reliable ethnic marker. In its place he is treated as a local figure, proposed as a kinsman of Sri Naw Nam Thum, who nonetheless maintained political affiliations with Lavo, itself under the influence of the Angkorian Mahidharapura line by the 1180s. Srisakara Vallibhotama had argued in 1981 that the Wat Si Chum Inscription records no more than a contest among the towns of the Sukhothai area, and that its ties to Cambodia were of alliance and marriage. Sujit Wongthes placed him in 1983 in a related polity of the Kamboja group centred on Lavo. Baker and Pasuk reach the same conclusion from another direction. They hold that the ethnic framing and the idea of liberation were imported from a later era, and read the inscription as recording a victory by one local lord associated with Angkor over another holding a Khmer title. Pha Mueang, the victor, had himself received a title, a regalia sword and a princess in marriage from the ruler at Angkor.
Thao Saen Pom
The correspondence between his name and the epithet of Thao Saen Pom has led to the proposal that they were the same person recorded in different traditions. Under this interpretation, the inscription preserves the Khmer form of the epithet, while the chronicles preserve its Thai form. Thao Saen Pom appears in legend as a poor cultivator whose body was covered in nodules and who married a Tai Yuan princess of Mueang Tri Trueng.
The same tradition places his subsequent move south, where he occupied the vacant throne of Suphannaphum around the middle of the thirteenth century. Chit Phumisak proposed that Saen Pom was probably the youngest son of Uthong II. His successor, Uthong III, is said to have consolidated authority in the region, while a marriage between Uthong III's daughter and Uthong V linked the line to Ayodhya. The dynasty descending from this line is generally known as the Suphannaphum dynasty. On this reconstruction, his defeat at Sukhothai marked not the end of his career but the point at which it shifted to the lower Chao Phraya basin.
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