Using the chbap to analyze pre-cotonial Cambodian society is difficult because these gnomic, normative poems are only incidentally concerned with the ways in which that society was put together. Moreover, it is hard to determine how firmly they are anchored in the times when they were written: how useful is a seventeenth century chbap, after all, in helping us to understand eighteenth-century society? Another problem with using them is that they often provide an idealized picture, suggesting norms of behaviour rather than describing or analyzing the ways in which people behave. Because of this, the poems belong to more than one century at a time. Finally, like anything written down in a largely illiterate society, the chbap encapsulate and pass on the ideology of a minority élite. It can be argued that this ideology, in pre-colonial Cambodia at least, was rarely at odds with the ideology of the rural, illiterate poor; but this may be a circular argument, brought on by the widespread popularity, imposed by the elite over several centuries, of the chbap themselves.