To cover Khmer kingship and more than a century of scholarship about it in one article is obviously an impossible task. Instead, this short piece is structured around commented verses quoted from the Raghuvaṃśa (arguably the most influential idealisation of classical Indian kingship ever) and from Cambodian inscriptions, with a view to highlighting attempts to conform to some ideals of Indian kingship, which are omnipresent in Cambodian representations, but often in a way that rings more than usually false because of the entirely different historical context. The themes explored include: 1) dynastic families descended from sun and moon, 2) Patrilineal descent, with the son (as yuvarāja) sharing the burden of kingship for some years before becoming fully king, 3) hit-and-run conquest in all directions (digvijaya) as part of the dharma of kings, thus establishing hierarchical supremacy, but not control of the resources of the territories thus ‘conquered’, 4) the symbiosis of Kṣatriyas with brahmins, who together dictate cosmic order, with the Kṣatriyas protecting the Veda-ordained activities of the brahmins, 5) the protection of the Sanskritic social order (varṇāśrama-dharma). All of these elements very clearly figure in many royal eulogies, but they are perhaps particularly muddled up in the Cambodian case, where patrilineal descent occurs, but doesn’t seem to be the rule, and where we find no named dynastic families; where war (as almost everywhere else on the planet) was not unrelated to resource-control; where there is no large corpus of grants to brahmin communities predating those that create and endow temples and monasteries; and where the Vedic ‘substrate’ religion seems to have had little hold, and there is concomitantly little evidence of varṇas or of a varṇāśramadharma for the king to protect.