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The legendary founders of the kingdom of Kambuja are the Brahman priest Sage Kambu Swayambhuva and the Nāga princess Soma, or Mera as she is known in some versions of the founding myth. Their marriage is said to have given rise to the name Khmer. The Khmer people named their kingdom Kambuja, after a Kshatriya tribe of Iron Age India. The Kambuja tribe are believed by modern scholars to be an Iranian-speaking people, but links between the Kambuja tribe and the Kambuja kingdom at this stage of research are still unclear. Ancient myths, some going back to the earliest written records in Southeast Asia, relate that in prehistoric times Cambodia was underwater, and that only the highest mountaintops were above sea level, forming a scattered group of islands. The inhabitants of these islands were the reptilian race of the Nāga. Cambodia was created when an ancient Indian Brahmin priest married Princess Soma, a Naga princess, upon following an arrow in his dream that pointed in the direction of somewhere in Cambodia. As a dowry, the father of princess Soma drank the oceans, and the land that was revealed underneath became Cambodia, with the descendants of the priest and the princess the people known as the Khmer. This myth explains the phenomena of why the oldest Khmer wats, or temples, were always built on mountaintops, and why today mountains themselves are still revered as holy places.[11] Arrival in Southeast Asia[edit] The Khmers are one of the oldest ethnic groups in the area, having filtered into Southeast Asia around the same time as the Mon who settled further to the west and to whom the Khmer are ancestrally related. Most archaeologists and linguists, and other specialists like Sinologists and crop experts, believe they arrived no later than 2000 BCE (over four thousand years ago) bringing with them the practice of agriculture and in particular the cultivation of rice. This region is also one of the first places in the world to use bronze. They were the builders of the later Khmer Empire, which dominated Southeast Asia for six centuries beginning in 802 CE, and now form the mainstream of political, cultural, and economic Cambodia. The Khmers developed the first alphabet still in use in Southeast Asia which in turn gave birth to the later Thai and Lao scripts. The Khmers are considered by archaeologists and ethnologists to be indigenous to the contiguous regions of Northeast Thailand, southern Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam. That is to say the Khmer have historically been a lowland people who lived close to one of the tributaries of the Mekong River. The reason they migrated into Southeast Asia is not well understood, but scholars believe that Mon–Khmer were pushed down by invading Sino-Tibetans