Devaraja, god king, names the ideology of sacred kingship that underpinned the Khmer Empire centered on Angkor from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries, in which the reigning monarch was identified with a Hindu deity, most often Shiva, through a specific royal cult established, according to the empire's own inscriptions, by the founding king Jayavarman II around 802 CE. The cult centered on a linga, the aniconic emblem of Shiva, ritually installed and understood to house the king's own divine essence, tying the kingdom's cosmic order directly to the person and continuity of its monarch in a way that made royal ritual and temple building, above all the vast temple mountains of Angkor itself, central acts of state rather than separate religious observance.
The devaraja cult drew on wider Hindu and, as the Khmer Empire's religious character shifted, Mahayana Buddhist concepts of divine kingship already circulating across South and Southeast Asia, adapted into a specifically Khmer institutional form that gave the monarchy a cosmological legitimacy considerably stronger than dynastic descent or military success alone could provide. Jayavarman II's own inscriptions frame the cult's founding explicitly as an act of independence, freeing the Khmer realm from prior subordination to Java, tying the new dynasty's cosmological legitimacy to its political sovereignty from the outset.