THE ANCIENT CITIES

Angkor
The kingdom, generally known as Angkor, consists of the founding temple of Pnom Bak Kheng, Angkor Thom, and Angkor Vat, just to name a few. In Chou Ta-kuan's report by a Chinese envoy, as translated by archeologist Coedes,
-He describes a city that corresponds exactly to the city of Jayavarman VII, present day Angkor Thom, with its walls and moats, its five gates preceded by bridges with balustrades of nagas, the gold tower (the Bayon) in the center of the city, the copper tower (the Baphuon) one li to the north, and the royal palace another li farther north. Outside the city he mentions the South, the Tower of Lu Phan (Pnom Bak Kheng) and the Tomb of Lu Pan (Angkor Vat). (Coedes, 213)

The original monument was built under the reign of Udayadityavarman II, in the late eleventh century. Pnom Bak Kheng's natural shape is phallic and meant to be a "linga," the potent part of Siva the Destroyer. An interesting thing about Pnom Bak Kheng is that it acts as a drum; it echoes and resonates. Underneath the high tower, the depression or hollow place which produces the resonating sound, there is a square crypt delving deep into the earth. This crypt holds the story of "the Twelve Women of Angkor."

The story talks of a poor woodcutter with twelve daughters, a situation which was supposedly a very bad luck. He could not support them, so he tries to lose them in the woods, unsuccessfully. The woodcutter tries a second time and is successful, but instead of dying the twelve girls are found by the Queen of the Ogres, Santhomea. The queen took the girls in, caring for them as if they were her own. Yet, out of shear loneliness, the girls runaway. They find themselves at the kingdom of Angkor, whose king takes a fancy to them and marries them. The women lived happily, until Santhomea found them. To exact revenge for leaving, the queen bewitches the king and has the twelve women banished to a hole in the ground, but not after gouging out their eyes. For the third time, the women found themselves left to die. One of the girls, however, hid one of her eyes and could still partially see. The one-eyed sister helped in finding food and the girls survived. One daughter even had a child-- a boy--who survives to adulthood and avenges his mother and aunts. He kills Santhomea, and the sisters return to their king, to live happily ever after. (Casey, 175-188)

Angkor Thom was built after Pnom Bak Kheng by the king Yacovarman, but the Angkor Thom It was embellished, walled and moated in 1811 by Jayavarman VII. It held moats, gateways and towers with the faces of the Bodhisattva Lokesvara, and the Bayon, the great temple "mountain" of Angkor Thom, built in honor of Buddharaja from the Buddha religion were all added. The Bayon laid in the center of the complex where its walls were adorned with huge amounts of bas-reliefs depicting the life of the Khmer. The Bayon was also found to be temple where the ancestral worshipping took place, again an assimilation of multicultures.

Angkor Vat
Angkor Vat was built as a kind of temple/mausoleum for Suryavarman II in honor of the god Vishnu. The greatest of the Khmer monuments, Angkor Vat was lined and donned with carvings of more than one thousand images of apsaras (female deities), huge towers, staircases, pools for bathing, and temples for worshipping.

The kingdom of Angkor has many myths surrounding its beginnings, which serve as rich illustrations of the start of the height of Khmer culture.

The myth of Angkor centers around a story called "King Kambu and the Snake Lady." This story, according to Robert Casey, is a kind of reverse "Beauty and the Beast." He also speculates that Khmer culture of the Mekong Delta region has Indian origins.
Long ago a young Indian prince traveled to Southeast Asia to find a kingdom of his own. He found Arya Desa, a small kingdom recently ravaged by drought and famine. This prince, Kambu, meets a native and asks him to take him to the king of the land. The native, Dak, takes Kambu to the King of the Nagas (snake king). Kambu tells the Naga King that he wishes, with the King's permission, to settle in his land. The Snake King agrees and gives his daughter to Kambu in marriage, a kind of symbolic melding of the Indian and early Khmer culture. (Casey, 88-100)

Casey interprets Kambu as an archetypal figure, which may represent a movement of people from famine stricken India to the land of plenty in the Mekong Delta. This migration, at least in Casey' s eyes, brings an "intellectual conquest" by Brahman missionaries. The Khmer then grafted Hindu/Indian thought on top of their existing culture. This resulted in the development of a priestly class, seen as somewhat divine, and a written language built upon Sanskrit. The marriage of Kambu and the snake lady represents a kind of symbolic melding of the Indian and early Khmer culture. Supposedly, "Kambujas" meaning "sons of Kambu," is the original name of the people, which through many translations by outsiders, changed to "Cambodian."