Walking the Royal Road: The Ancient Kingdom of Angkor

welcome to the MFA for this evening's program in celebration of Asian Pacific Heritage Month my name is Celeste feta and I'm manager of adult and higher education here at the Museum and it's my pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker dr. Jennifer Foley Jennifer first became interested in Asia as an undergraduate at Brooklyn College an interest in the Chinese language led to a semester in Nanjing China followed by a nearly two-year stay at Hanoi Vietnam she attended graduate school at Cornell University in Ithaca New York where she studied Asian art history she has since returned to Southeast Asia to conduct field research spending two more two more years living in Cambodia and Vietnam before completing her doctrine and you can also go to our blog and see her on a motorcycle in Vietnam which I really encourage you to do this is great great picture she has been with me MFA for two of almost two years now right and she's an outstanding addition to the education and statewide partnerships department we're very lucky to have her and I know that you'll be delighted and informed by her talk this evening walking the Royal Road the ancient kingdom of anchor Jennifer thank you thank you very much um so I am very very happy to be here to give this talk tonight and also to have the opportunity to talk about a subject that is near and dear to my heart I did write my dissertation on Cambodia so this is it's very exciting to be able to give a talk about something that I really have a really deep love for so I thought I started actually this is one of my photographs because I had the wonderful opportunity of spending a fair amount of time in Cambodia and have been to Ankur a number of times and prior to going I had spent several years actually researching encore and various different temples in that area I'd seen hundreds of photographs I'd seen the plans I'd seen all of those things and the one thing I have to say is that it still did not prepare me for actually going that even after having spent years studying all of these places when I got to the stairs it I mean I burst into tears it was so amazing so it really is just an astonishing place and none of the photographs here will do justice of course I'm going to have to encourage everybody here to go to Cambodia and I thought we'd start with a map because maps are always good just to sort of give you an idea of the the placement this map sort of situates Cambodia in Southeast Asia and you can see it in relation to India as well and then with a little bit at the bottom on the world and then a map of Cambodia itself and there are a couple of things that made it possible for the civilization of Angkor to rise and become as powerful as it did and that really influenced the the sort of turns that it took particularly in terms of art and architecture and one of the things to understand about Cambodia in this area is what happens with the toneless SAP which you can see here this is very large lake that's sort of in the middle of Cambodia and it's called the Tonle Sap and it is fed into by a number of rivers but one of one of the rivers that it connects up to sort of toward the bottom is the Mekong and what happens is that every year there is so much water that is flowing down from melted snow in the Himalayas that the river actually changes course and reverses itself parts of it actually begin to flow upstream but there's such an overflow that it pushes into that zone the SAP so that lake doubles in size every year and when it doubles in size it floods out obviously into the countryside and so you can see some images here of the the flooding and actually this is a good thing because when it does that it brings with it all of the silts that has been coming down stream and that silt is very very rich and it also brings fish there's just huge bounty of fish that occurs at that point and so people are able to add even more protein into their diets but also that it makes it possible to have rice fields that look like this that are just incredibly verdant and rich and it makes it possible for there to be a tremendous harvest every year and this has been going on for millennia so this is one of the sort of foundational pieces of information about thinking about the rise of encore was that one of the reasons why it was possible was because you had this cycle that was going on every year that made this part of the world an incredibly rich place agriculturally so it's sort of a place to start from the other thing that is important to to contemplate is the movement of ideas having to do with particularly religions that were going throughout Asia going back to the first centuries of the Common Era there is a movement from India or from the area that is now India of lots of traders going back and forth and other people going back and forth who are bringing religious ideas and in particular there is a movement of ideas related to Hinduism this is the sort of hindu trinity which consists of shiva mesa these images are from india so this gives you an idea of the things that are sort of being brought from in arriving in Cambodia so we have Shiva we have Vishnu who's shown here with two of his consorts and Brahma these are the the sort of three deities that make up the the Hindu Trinity and so we see images in Cambodia within the following centuries we begin to see these images of the same gods that appear in Cambodia and also in other parts of Southeast Asia we see this also occurring in what is now Thailand we see it occurring in Burma we see it occurring to a lesser extent in what is now Java so there was this kind of movement of these religious ideas out across Southeast Asia the other very important religious idea that also travels to South East Asia and travel specifically to Cambodia is Buddhism and so this is another an Indian image of Buddha but we see especially some of the very earliest pieces that have been found in what is today Cambodia are actually Buddhist images and there have been some thoughts as to whether or not there might have been a kind of class differentiation in terms of worship whether Hinduism was something that the the upper classes practiced well the the middle class and lower class would have practiced Buddhism but I don't think it's really been kind of decided one way or the other some of the earliest images that have been found are votive images very small images that would have been transportable so it really gives a sense of how these things were moving around and there was a lot of trade going on at the same time as well thinking about the size of Cambodia we have again this image of Cambodia as it is today in the bottom right when that's not what it was always like when it was the Khmer Empire it actually took over a very significant amount of what we think of a Southeast Asia today if we look at the the two maps here this one down here the green part is the kingdom of champa the CIAM are an ethnic minority that still lives in Vietnam today they used to have a very large Kingdom as you can see until the the Vietnamese who were at the time called the get sort of gradually moved south and the the CIAM as a people were sort of subsumed within the the larger power of the means but at the time of the Khmer Empire this area down here was the Chong and they are important very important in Cambodian history because there's a lot of back and forth in terms of battles that go on and fighting and it has a big influence on what happens to Cambodia over time but looking at this other map you can see how far over the Khmer Empire spread and it spreads well into what is today Thailand that the place that we think of as Thailand which used to be called Siam didn't really start to kind of break away as a separate place until about the 15th century so up until then most of this was really part of the Khmer Empire as well as a lot of what we think of today as southern Vietnam plate like the city of Saigon was in the Khmer Empire if you go back several hundred years and in the earliest pieces that we see the earliest sculptures that we see coming from the Khmer Empire you can see that the clear influence of Indian art and Indian imagery of those Hindu deities and so the one on the left is from India and the one on the right is a very early pre Angkorian piece from what is today Cambodia and so the sort of timeline in Cambodian history is broken into the pre Angkorian on gorian and the post on gorian so we start today with the pre and gorian pieces the one on the right was is thought of as pnom da style and that is kind of the baseline the earliest pieces that we have are really from that period and actually that word plume down means a large hill and there is an archaeological site that's in kind of central southern Cambodia where a lot of these pieces were found and we see that influence of the that Indian style going on for a mount of time in Cambodian sculpture as you can see here that we still have that kind of mitered top the the kind of helmet II thing that he's got on and even the style of the body the style of the face looks somewhat different from what we see have later when we get a much more specifically khmer style occurring once we get out of the premium there's actually not terribly many pieces from the pre and gorian period and there are no buildings that have survived we know that they probably had temples of some sort they may not have been made out of stone they probably weren't they may have been wood and this would probably explain why we don't have any of those buildings today but the ones that we're really going to be concentrating on today are all from the Angkorian period and this map is actually this is the map that you'll get if you visit Cambodia and you got anger and they will give you this so that you can find your way around to all of the temples in what is today called the uncor Historical Park so uncle is not just one temple it's actually a very large group of temples that are all in what is really a park-like setting the French had set up during the colonial period as a sort of separate entity so but this gives you an idea if you look at this map you can see there's a lot of names on it and the Khmer Empire was very very busy with the building so they have lots and lots and lots of temples and they're all sort of grouped into a small area and they're not all tremendously large some of them are small some of them are really no more than one tower and some of them are very much monumental so they're sort of in a variety of shapes and sizes but you can see that there's a significant number of them and this represents building that that took place over about three and a half four centuries so the the earliest temples that we have from the Angkorian period are these ones and this low lie group were built during the reign of Indra Varman ii he was not the first and gorian King the first and gorian King was named jaya varm in the second and he reigned from 1802 to 1834 and the thing about jaya vermin the second is that we don't actually know a whole lot about him but there are a number of Kings that come later including a very very important one who kind of throwback to that name so that name jaya varma keeps coming back again and again in particularly at the kind of close of the key of the on gorian period we see that name being used and they're not a direct lineage it is kind of a borrowing a borrowing of legitimacy of an earlier king by borrowing the name so this group was built by Indra Varman the first and what we see is the the beginnings of what really we think of as being that khmer style where there is that tiered tower often grouped where there's two or three sometimes five this here you can see the tiers going up where you have kind of plants coming out of it the other thing that comes out in this is the decoration that we begin to see in these temples that tells us the direction we're going to be going in with all temples from this point forward the direct the decoration on temples in Cambodia are is just amazing and it's amazing what a survived and then you thinking about this is something from the late 8th hundreds so the fact that we still have anything to look at it's really kind of spectacular the other thing that we see is the with that decoration there is particularly these earlier pieces there sometimes two different materials going on the sculpture will be done using sandstone or granite and then a more porous stone is actually used for the building so often the building itself looks like it's in rougher shape than the sculpture but there is a lot of focus on detail particularly with things like the lentils which we see on the right-hand side here and also with doorways where there's a lot of attention to detail here in a lot of false doorways a lot of the these buildings will have these false doorways that are just exquisitely decorated and so even from the very first buildings we're seeing this amazing attention to detail an incredible amount of effort and time is being put into the the decoration of everything down to you know the sort of these little kind of brick things that are popping out of a false doorway I mean this isn't even the entrance so so a lot of work has gone into something it isn't even the way you get in this is the first temple that really is showing us the map of what a Cambodian temple is and and I use the word map very specifically because the temples that the Khmer built are in fact maps they are cosmological maps they're maps of the universe as understood by the Khmer and so what you see in these temples is this kind of recreation of a mountain and they are actually recreating a mountain they're recreating a cosmological mountain and so this you will see kind of this shape repeat itself over and over as we go through this it's the same temple from a different angle but you see there's that kind of central tower that is the tallest and then the tears come down and it gets wider but shorter as it comes down and this is this is an elevation also a plan to sort of show you the way that it's shaped where we have this these tiers that each one of these goes up up up until you get to that central prong the central tower that is the tallest point which you can see in the elevation here and what this is recreating is this and this is a mandala that is actually a cosmological map this one is not from Cambodia but it's it gives you a sense of what those temples are recreating in three dimensions on a massive scale they are recreating this map which is a map of the universe this and what it is is a recreation of the sacred mountain Mero now Mount marrow and the the mountain range that it existed in mount Mero is at the center and then each of the mountains is surrounded by a sea which surrounds at another range of mountains another sea a range of mountains which is what you're looking at on the right hand side this is Mero at the center and then each of the the light ones are ranges of mountains the dark ones are actually kind of almost moat like oceans that surround them and so that's really what we're seeing when we see that kind of square with each level going up is that it's representing each of those tiers of that cosmological map of mountain arrow and this kind of comes to a head with this temple the bakheng because this temple is not just it's not just that prong in the middle that is sort of standing up very nice and tall it's actually situated on a hill so rather than trying to just recreate that hill they actually placed it on a hill and so you get this sort of spectacular view of looking off from this hill so the highest point in that whole area is actually very flat as you look around so it's the one kind of really tall geological formation and sitting at the top of it is this stone terrace with the the temple of the bucking and as you look off into the distance it took this at sunrise so it's a little dark but right over here there is a tower and that is the central prong or the central tower of Angkor Wat so this was done several hundred years before Angkor Wat but it certainly was done uncle Wat was created with the idea that it would be viewed from the book hang and so they're sort of situated in relation to each other in that sense and it is a very spectacular view it's really good to go there at sunrise so as we look at this map again now I said that there were these mountain ranges and each mountain range goes up very much like those temples are structured so that mountain arrow in the middle is the tallest point and then each of the ranges is sort of shorter as you come down but as I said each of them is surrounded by a moat like ocean and those moat like oceans are in fact recreated the use of water during the Angkorian period is really very very interesting the the Khmer built a massive and very complex series of canals in order to sort of control that water and to be able to irrigate out beyond the range of the flood from the Thomas Hauk so they took what was already making the the Kingdom very wealthy and then extended it out and there is a pretty amazing technological advance and they also had reservoirs that are called but I and that's actually what this is a picture of is the eastern but I and if we look at this this image from space this is actually a picture that NASA has on their website this is that but I that we just looked at so the body are I mean they're massive they're absolutely huge they are visible from space you know they are just tremendous and you can see that actually this there's two of them there's another one over here is two very large ones there's also smaller ones and some of them still hold water and they're really pretty amazing I mean we start to think about something that was built over a thousand years ago and it's still functioning to a certain extent you know not as well as it did when during its time but pretty good for a thousand years I think when we see going on beyond that point we see this kind of continuation again of this idea of the temple mountain the temple that is representative of that mouth marrow we see this with this this temple here up rajab and this was built during the reign of Rajendra varm and the first who reigned in the sort of middle of the 10th century and you can see that there's sort of upping the ante with each of these as we go through them they'll get taller they'll get larger they get more decorative and each one is sort of more impressive than the one before and this is another angle we'll put it up you can see it's taller than the previous one and we get taller still when we go to the Gayo and this one was begun during the reign of Jaya and the fifth so again Jaya Varman has returned so he's he establishes the Angkorian period which is why there's always that return to that name but we see it again again so this one was begun during Jaya varm the fist it was continued by the person who took over from him and it's also during that period that we get what is I must admit my favorite temple which is this one this is month I slay and it is the only temple that has been found anywhere in Cambodia the of any size that was not actually built by a monarch this one was was built by a courtier who had been the the tutor of one of the kings when he had been very young and he as he was getting older he had this this temple built and it's it's actually a ways outside of the sort of core of the temples around Ankur it's a ways out from uncle Wat it's kind of it actually wasn't the French did a lot of excavating and things and they tried to find a fair amount of stuff they started working in the Angora area in the late 19th century this one wasn't found until 1914 it was stumbled upon by a marine who happened to be out trying to do some surveying and he literally stumbled upon it and at the time it had it would have been kind of taken over by the jungle so it's actually a ways out but it's very different in a lot of ways one of which is that the scale is really very different there is and one of the things as notable is that there is no attempt in this one to recreate that cosmological map that this is not a temple mountain it is not Mount Meru it's not structured to recreate with the Monarchs - because he wasn't trying to be a monarch the the courtier who built this was sort of legendary for having been a tutor to a king when he was a child and it was very common not just him in the Khmer Empire but actually many many empires for somebody in that position to usurp the legitimate Kings place because the legitimate king was a child and so he was sort of legendary for having actually stuck to his duty and just tutored the king and then gone on his merry way and he's supposed to have become a monk when he became elderly and so he's kind of known for being that the person who walked the just path and so he builds this temple and so it's on a very human scale it's not on a monarch scale it's not supposed to be on the scale for the gods to see but is more of a dedication to the the Khmer Empire to the king the other thing that's interesting about it is that it's made of red sandstone so it's actually very different visually from any of the other temples which were mostly sheet in granite or limestone and so they're usually gray this one is actually red sandstone and it also has just the most beautiful incredible decorative sculpture I think anywhere on the planet when you begin to look at the delicacy of the the decoration it's really just astounding it is an absolute jewel it has these entryways you can see the the decoration of the entryways are very very differently shaped than any of the other ones that you will see but it is that warm color as the Sun hits it it just turns this deep rich orangish pink it has this very small buildings in the interior courtyard and there you can see this whole thing is is just carved and decorated and it's just amazing there's no surface that has been left alone and the the carving the true personalities that these images have their individual people they're not of a type that each face is different each of the the women of the men of the guards of the opposite and also a sort of celestial dancers they all have different faces in different decorations and different hairstyles and different earrings and they're all individuals it's just astounding actually though it's a what you hear in that bundle a is it means women so this has actually been named the citadel of women but it's unclear whether this was somebody found it later and thought of it's all covered with women and gave it that name or if it's something it actually comes to us from earlier times the there are these beautiful lentils that are above the doors of the the small buildings in the courtyard and they depict scenes from various Hindu legends also from epic poetry there is there are a couple scenes from the Ramayana and you can just see the the detail is just amazing and in this gives you a sense of also that decorative imagery this this image in the middle is the garuda which is a sort of mythical bird and you sort of pulling this kind of leafy branch up and this is again a lintel that would be over one of the doors and just to sort of give you a sense of just what is going on in the rest of the world when this temple is being made the image on the left is a European sculpture from the same time period and it to my eyes just doesn't have quite the same life that the Cambodian piece does so I mean it's just an amazing temple so if you go you really have to go visit this temple as we move on from from Monday today we get again there is this kind of almost upping the ante as we go this the ba Quan has a very very different layout than any of the previous ones even though we're again recreating that mountain and you can see it's sort of off in the distance here it has had a couple of collapses over time it used to be a lot taller but the thing that's really amazing about this is is this incredible causeway that has been built and this area although it is full of vegetation now at the time when this was built would have had reflecting pools in them but again we get this incredible attention to detail on these pillars holding up the causeway so there's never a sort of plain surface left anywhere and this was sort of built it was begun during the reign of Buddha T of Armin ii but he was kind of at a period where there was a lot of change on and there was we had suri of arm in the first usurped the throne and so there is sort of a bit of strife going on at this point nevertheless we get very really wonderful lively sculpture from this period as well and that's something a lot of what I'm going to be focusing on in this talk is really looking at those structures and then looking at the decoration of the structures but there is a whole world of wonderful sculpture out there that is sort of associated with each of these but I just kind of wanted to give an overview rather than delving into that but just to sort of give you a sense of the the kind of sculpture that was being created the time and thinking about those first sculptures that I'd shown from the domed a period that pre and gorian period that looked a lot more like Indian sculptures by the time that we get here these are chimera sculptures these really have a very different feel to them that features are very different the way of the body is very different at the certainly the decoration that headdresses and things is very different so this is really looking like identifiably chimera sculpture so thinking again about the way in which the the Khmer Empire sort of expanded out it wasn't just as we see this kind of expansion in terms of the architecture where the the temples are getting sort of larger and more grandiose and talking over much taller and they have a lot more decoration the Empire itself is actually expanding out as well they are taking over territory so they stirred it out much more and by the time that they get to this is about what it was during the height of the Khmer Empire and we can see that it has taken over a lot of this is a lot of what is now Thailand and places like this where it says PMI here moon bomb those are temples that the Khmer bills that are in what is today Thailand and so this is just an example of that this is PMI which is in present-day Thailand but is a Khmer temple that was built during the period when that Empire expanded out and PMI is is still a temple that a lot of people visit on over regular basis there's a link inside that people come and do various offerings to as you can see here after the construction of PMI we have the rise of King Suri of arm of the second and this is probably the pinnacle of Angkorian life and gorian art is the the reign of Suri of arm in the second and this is the start of what is thought of as the Classical period of encore and that in his relief we actually have a portrait of the king he's sitting here on the throne it's got all these attendants who are Fanning him and and of course he's you know four times as big as everybody else so that means he must be the king the temple that was built during the reign of Suri of arm in the second I mean there were several that were built during that period but the one that is really the best-known is uncle Wat and uncle wat like the bought eyes is visible from space it is this this thing right here and this is a little closer look at it that recalling that we are looking at the recreation of that cosmological map and there are those moat like oceans and how better to create a moat like ocean than to build a giant moat so it really is surrounded by a giant moat that has a path this is actually the eastern path which is no longer used and there's a causeway on either sides there's a causeway here that is currently used the western causeway and this one is not really induced anymore the temple itself there are two reflecting pools in front of it as we can see here on either side of the causeway and then on either side of the reflecting pools there are what we call the libraries or two library buildings and then we have the temple itself sort of in the middle the layout of the temple is really very interesting it still follows that that map that we've seen in the plans of all of the other ones but it's the one that really is most success full in terms of recreating that map Mountain arrow sort of layout and one thing that's very interesting to look at is the the elevation drawing here where you really sort of see the way they have set it up with the the prom with the central prong in the middle and these actually represent there's one on either corner so there's actually four there's two directly behind it and again this is recreated down here so you have the the four at the bottom level the four the top one the one in the middle and then again that moach as well I mean it's just astonishing when you start to think about this was built in the 12th century the manpower that would have been involved it's just kind of astonishing and the your fun fact for today is that if you were to take all of the stone that is used in the n° gorian temple so all of these temples that are inside that on gorian historical park and you were to add it up it actually is more stone than are at the pyramids so it's it's really kind of beyond comprehension there are they built roads that in a lot of and you find these Angkorian period bridges that are still in use still being used things that were bridges that were built in you know the 10th 11th 12th century that still have people driving in cars over them I mean it's astonishing so when you add all that stone together it's it's more than the pyramids you can really get a sense of what those the Towers the plum look like this is looking up one side and people do in fact climb up these they're incredibly steep and there is actually a chain in the middle so you can haul yourself up and I mean it it is so much taller than you would think until you get there then you start really thinking about how it all ends and this sort of gives you a sense I mean again this idea of scale these palm trees are like 40 feet high so you know this is a large large large building and this is kind of what the view is from the the causeway as you're getting close to it and that causeway is very very large so it's incredibly long as you come up to it you sort of are going across the causeway there's the moat when you get to the other side there is a gallery a very large covered gallery with a pond in the middle of it and then you've got more causeway on the other side and you know you walk for probably another quarter mile at least until you get to here where you're looking at this and you can see here this is the central Pung and then there is this one there's one directly behind it and again over here so they call it the the quincunx setup of that central mount mirror where you have the top peak the four peaks around it at the kernel directions one of the things that is very very interesting about this temple is that unlike the previous temples which were mostly dedicated to Shiva the god the Hindu god Shiva this one is dedicated to Vishnu it's the only major temple that is dedicated to Vishnu and actually Surya Varman the second saw himself as being not quite an avatar but in some way very much connected to Vishnu and there was sort of a thought that the kings of Cambodia were infused with a deity and so he saw himself as being kind of infused with the deity Vishnu which is why this temple the main entrance points west because west is the direction for Vishnu whereas all of the other temples their main entrance face East because that's the direction for Shiva so it's very different in some ways while still being very much of the type that we see leading up to it and it's still something that's very much in use as we see here there is a monk over here on the left looking out and that's once you have hold yourself up on that chain and there are still statues these are both in that outer gallery but while it's still in use it is not in use as a Hindu temple it is in use as a sort of Buddhist pilgrimage site which is why the Buddhist monk there and the the figures that are wrapped in that kind of saffron robe almost like amongst themselves because it is today a tear about a Buddhist pilgrimage site and this is actually what that gallery looks like so this is as you're walking up the causeway and you're going across the moat this is the first thing you see and then when you get to the other side you still got a ways to go when you look here you can see these ballast rods here on the side they're not just ballast rods they're actually giant cosmological snakes this is what the end of one of the ballast rods look like and there's these sculptures showing the end of many of these this is called a Naga the ones here are seven headed and the the Naga is a sort of mythological creature that comes up quite a bit in a lot of both Hindu and Buddhist mythology in Buddhism we we often see images of the Buddha sitting with a sort of snake-like creature over him and that's a Naga and but this comes up also in Hindu mythology in fact the Naga comes up in a mythological recreation that we see on this temple which we'll get to in just a moment the decoration on Agora is really exquisite there are thousands of images that are carved into the sides of the gallery into the sides of the temple at all the levels going up and many many many of them are of opposite Azure devata and so these kind of the opposite are these sort of celestial dancers or daveake which are kind of like female semi deities and so we see just these images carved everywhere the sides of the temple at the lowest level have these covered galleries here and these go all the way around all four sides at that lowest level of course the lowest level is the largest level right because as they go up they get smaller that gallery on the interior wall that you can see through the pillars has ball reliefs all the way around there is more than a mile of Bob release all the way around it's astonishing and they are we can see as a good at the bar reliefs are here and so this is you know an early 12th or sort of early to mid 12th century temple and these bar elites are so very very clear because it is a covered gallery we've been very very lucky that it is a covered gallery so we haven't really had too much damage from the elements and the the reliefs are just amazing and so again this is that image of Surrey of arm in the second this is part of a three tiered ball relief that runs along I think about this for a second the south side of the the temple where he is on the top level of course right but there are those who are less fortunate down here who are kind of struggling through hell and there are various demons which have these sort of demonic looking faces and large sticks who are beating these poor people then here whose ribs are sticking out and are all tied together with things around their neck so we have kind of hell on this level and then this is earth and then up here is heaven so this three tiered ball relief that runs all the way down that side one of the other things that is going on on that level is a sort of scene of a procession of troops going to battle and you'll recall that I had mentioned the chow at an earlier point the kingdom of champa and there were they had the Khmer head battles with a number of other groups in Southeast Asia they they got into it fairly often also with the Burmese but the CIAM were a real problem and they had a rather successful raid on kingdom of champa 1080 and as the the records say they showed up in the the King had to go scurrying off and they they made off with all of their musicians and their women so they were big on halt in the women it was like pirates or something so they hauled off all the dancers and other women and the musicians which I always thought was interesting like they show up and they want the gold and and the guitar player so you brought them all back to to Al Gore and the Chum didn't take it well but you know they had just lost everything so it took them a while to figure out what to do about it and but they come back a while later and do some serious damage but at this point they haven't come back yet so he's still even though it's already been 50 years kind of in the glow of success and so there's this kind of rating party that is shown here and actually this one is very interesting because we have two different types of troops going on here you see there's the ones on the Left who are wearing one outfit and then the ones on the right and there is a notation a little inscription under the one on the right that says that they are cm Cooke which we think means that they are Siamese people and what's very interesting is that at this point the the Siamese who later become the Thai this is when they're just starting to kind of become a force in Southeast Asia and so we see them appearing they're actually kind of mercenaries so they've been hired by the Khmer to help them with going on these raiding missions and they will they will later end up being invaded by the Siamese so I guess this was when they had ok relations with them but what's interesting is that you can see what the Khmer attitude toward the the Siamese was at the time because this group over here looks pretty regimented and they look kind of organized and even though you this one guy who's kind of chatting everybody else seems to be in line these guys are just all over the place they're kind of a mess so there you can kind of read this attitude that the Camaro like yeah you guys are alright for mercenaries but you know we kind of don't really have it together so the and we see this throughout the the mural it's a very very interesting in that sense that it gives us sort of an insight into some of what was going on at that moment and it's also something very interesting in terms of thinking about these murals is that prior to this all of the decoration on these temples is imagery of deities or celestial beings or of or it's just decorative and so suddenly we've got these murals that are showing a portrait of a king it's the first time that we see that we see a person who's an actual historical figure and certainly an idealized portrait but it's the first time an actual historical figure has shown up in one of these and then we have this image of these people these iam people who again it's this idea of something that's actually happening and was relevant at the time that it was being made it's the first point when we see this happening which is not to say that it's all stuff that was actually going on here we have the myth of the churning of the milk ocean which is one of my favorite myths and this is on the eastern side of the building this mural basically takes up the entire back of the the temple of that lower gallery and they this is the moment when kind of the universes is spun into being more or less it is when the elixir of life is released in in this story it was at a time in the universe where there was only gods and demons and both of them desperately wanted the elixir of life but there the only way to get the elixir of life was to churn it out of the milk ocean or the soma ocean so it's sort of you know milk as a metaphor but not as like an actual something you drink so the only way that they can get it is to turn it but there's not enough gods nor demons for them to get the churn going so they actually have to cooperate to get it to go and so of course both of both sides are scheming about how they're going to get the other side to cooperate and then steal the elixir of life away from them so and that's sort of what's being shown here we have on the one side these are the gods and on this side these are the demons and this is a giant turtle who sort of rises up from that sea of milk and agrees to be the base upon which the churn will be churned and the churn is actually mount Mero here comes back again so it gets used as a churn and we have vision here who is kind of hanging out on the churn watching this go and the thing the rope that is being used because it's a rope that is spun around the churn and they each side pulls and pulls and it turns and turns until the elixir of life is released the the rope that they are holding is in fact Onaga it is the great Naga who has agreed to be the sort of churn rope and so we get another this is just a second image of them we have sort of a one of the larger demons here and then we have over here this this is Hanuman the great monkey warrior of the Ramayana the epitome the remind of the gods and he's got the tail here as we go around the rest of the the murals we of course would have to have images of the two great epic poems of Southeast Asia which here we have two scenes that are from the ramayana and this is in fact an image of rowana who is sort of the villain of the the story and then we also have images from the Mahabharata and the reason why we have both of the epic poems one of which is that well first of all they're incredible problems and I encourage everybody to read them because they're really just astounding to read they're amazing but they also spread all across Southeast Asia and in fact there are performances of these two epic poems as shadow puppets as dances as a song that are still being done today all across Southeast Asia in Cambodia in Indonesia in Malaysia in Burma in Laos and they're being performed regardless of religion they transcend these things even though they both are based within Hinduism they are performed every single day in Indonesia which is the most populous Muslim nation on the planet so they transcend all of these things and the reason why they appear on this temple specifically we do sometimes see images of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata that show up in other places in Cambodia but they are extremely relevant to a temple that is dedicated to Vishnu because occasionally deities come to earth in human form as avatars which if anyone here is a gamer you probably have heard heard Avatar I was stolen from Sanskrit so and in Avatar is the the sort of human form of a deity and the hero of both of these poems both of these epics is in fact an avatar of Vishnu the hero of the Ramayana is Rama who is an avatar vision in the one of the major heroes of the Mahabharata is Krishna who is also an avatar of Vishnu so this is why these images appear on this temple but they're absolutely wonderful this is showing that the great battle on the Mahabharata they're incredible bow release that they go along the side of this temple and of course we have you know the sort of clothes of the periodicity of ironmen ii so we have armed the second rule for he had actually a very long reign of over 30 years we we think which when you think about the times is pretty spectacular and but of course you know all good things must come to an end and they do and it doesn't go well which is very confident actually we have this this is an image of by Malia which is a temple that was built during the reign of Gaza varm in the second he is assassinated and there's sort of a period where there's kind of a lot of people trying to take hold of the throne and all of this is capped off in 1177 when the Chum come back so they they were run out of town in 1080 but they have long memories so in 1177 they get on their boats and they float up the mekong and they went to town they set fire to things and they hauled off the women and the musicians and took them back to Joppa so things were it was dark dark days in encores in starting in 1177 and for a few years it was very very dark and things began to turn around in 1181 when we have the start of the reign of joy and the seventh so again that joy of Arman now drive home in the seventh is you you cannot escape him actually in Cambodia and you'll see why first of all he built a lot and we'll start with this this is you will recall the churning of the milk ocean he built a 3d life bigger than life-sized version of the churning of the milk ocean what you are looking at here is one of the asuras the demons in his line of other demons and he is holding on to the giant Naga as here and this is the spindle and then along the other side is the line of the gods and the other end of the Naga and often I would see children who live in the areas in Berea which is sort of the closest town to Ankur and I would see them out here playing on these things and so a child sitting on this thing comes up to about there so it gives you a sense of the size and they're absolutely enormous and so this was one of Jive arm in the seventh building projects he was kind of a Donald Trump of his time he liked to build things and he built a lot of things this is another angle again of the the the entranceway to another side of Uncle Tom Uncle Tom is sort of the this area that he sectioned off as being where he's going to put all of his temples it's not too far from a core wat but it's very large it has a number of temples inside including some that actually predate his arrival and at each of the cardinal points there is a road that runs into this and each one of those is topped by one of these gate towers not all of them have small caps the main building the one that we most closely associate with him is is this temple here the biome and the biome is very interesting a lot of ways one of which is that up until now everything that we have looked at has had a square plan this one has a round plan it still recreates Mount narrow it still has the the levels that go up and can see the central tower here and there are towers that go around here and there's another level here but the plan is actually round each level is round this gives you another angle of it and if you're looking very closely you're going to start to see that on each of these towers there's something there and that's going to become important this gives you a sense again of the what it might have looked like before it sort of started to fall apart with each of the towers a little more visible and if we look there we start to see what it is that is on all of those towers now this temple also has murals and these murals are in fact mostly about life life in the Khmer Empire and they are incredible historical documents and so rich and they have wonderful pictures of elephants and one of the things that we have here is that if you looked at the bottom is that marching army of chum he recalls that four years prior to his arrival the chum came in sacked on ghor and that entire battle is actually shown in murals on this temple so you get these really amazing battle scenes and some of them are really quite violent and we have sort of dead bodies on the ground and things and people with giant axes and stuff it's obviously a very close in the memories of everybody who is living there the artist and the king of like and yet we also these wonderful trees that are full of birds who are watching on I love that the the birds are sort of sitting up there and watching the battle with the chow we have again this incredible battle going on we have different scenes with all of these elephants that are being ridden and you can actually tell which ones are the child's by their headgear they've been given this headgear which is the headgear of the Chow so there is a really exquisite sort of delineation of different groups going on in the art and we also have the charm showing up in their boats on the mekong with all of their headgear and their spears at the ready and the thing that i like best about this is that they're all these fish here and that there's a little alligator here too and here they are they're all squatted down and they're both ready to ready to attack but even while this is going on there's also just regular life going on and these murals are really amazing for this it's a market these people are at a market it's really just astonishing that we have a market over on the edge and then we have these guys who are burning these leaves because they're supposed to be curing the leper king with the special leaves over here which will go into the boiling water along the pig and so we have the sort of daily life scenes and these daily life scenes pop up again and again we have an image of cockfighting here these two guys they've each got their prize rooster and these guys are arguing I'll bet this much or not because I mean it's an amazingly lifelike image that I mean you could you sort of feel like you could see this happening somewhere now and if you don't like cockfighting you could always go for dogfighting which I hear sometimes happens so this I mean we have these two dogs here and again the betting going on and you know in this wonderful temple like building in the back which is this style actually resembles the style of wooden buildings that we see in Cambodia today the other thing that we see a lot of on this building also on other buildings from earlier times but it's something that we see a lot of during the reign of joy in the seventh are these images of ops Eva and so we have these three oxido who are sort of dancing these celestial dancers and these are a motif that we see again and again and again during this period the other thing that we're seeing is we have an image of somebody worshipping - a statue of Vishnu so we have a picture of what worship looked like as well so I mean they're just incredibly rich and this I love this image this is a Chinese ship because they traded with the Chinese so they're showing all aspects of life from what they do for entertainment to how they trade to their calamities um what's really really interesting about this temple and all the ones that come during Jaya varm the seventh are that even though there is that image of somebody worshipping Vishnu it is not a Hindu temple it's actually a Buddhist temple and the period in which he was living Jaya varm in the seventh that period is the only time during the Khmer Empire in which there were Buddhist a temple is being built because prior to him all of the kings associated themselves with a Hindu deity he associated himself with the Buddha and so remember I was saying about the images of the Buddha with a seven headed snake above him it comes from a moment in the the Buddha's life in which he is meditating and it begins to rain and he is such connection with all the creatures of the world that this Naga comes up and creates an umbrella by spreading open his hood over him so that he doesn't get rained on while he's meditating and so it's one of the reasons why we see this a lot but again it's that Naga that ends up on the end of those balance rods is now you know here over this visa is actually a wonderful piece that we have in our own collection here of the head of the Buddha and this is why I said you had to take a really good look at what was on top of those towers on the biown and as you can see it's faces and there's actually one on each side at the cardinal directions every one of those towers all 56 of them have this face four times facing in each direction and it is the face of Lokesh vara which is a sort of incarnation of the Buddha and the reason why he's facing in all those directions and is on all of those pinnacles is because the Buddha sees everything so he is looking out in all directions over the world and Luca Shara's also is associated with Avila koteshwara who is the the Bodhisattva of mercy again in his many many many construction projects he tops those towers at the gates of angkor thom he tops the the towers at benthic Bay which is another temple that he builds during his period if you his face is over here this is the other side where the the gods are this is at the problem his face is topping towers there so it is not only a look at - bara of the Bodhisattva of Mercy who sees out in all directions and heals your pain it is also your King Jaya varman the seventh but also to remind you that he's watching you so you best be careful and to give you a sense of the amount of construction that goes on during the young gorian period this is a map that was drawn up by researchers at the University of Sydney where they are plotting basically everything they're plotting temples they're plotting areas where there was sort of built-up domiciles and things like that during that period and you can see there's a lot this is just in the area of on-court these are the two reservoirs here this is uncle Wat down here and that's uncle Dome where the biown is but all of this is all where people were living and there was this massive kind of construction frenzy that goes on during Jive arm in the seventh he builds an enormous number of things not only does he build the biome which is huge it is a massive temple and it's not quite as massive as Angkor Wat but it's very very large he has the gates that go around on court dome he builds this temple here which has been think a day he builds top plum which we see here it's one of the few that has been left with a fair amount of the vegetation on it and so people have very romantic notions about it he also built pretty calm which actually was a complex it had a number of buildings in it as well as a main temple here he built the bunt H MA he built neck bond and he built others as well and so it's not terribly surprising that as we begin to look at the Nia some of these are really very very large you know I think a day is actually takes up a lot of space and uses a lot of stone but the chamalla is not that small either top dome is pretty large so the amount of just the stone and keeping in mind that there is no core in your body they were quarrying in what is today Laos floating stuff down the river it's a long way away exactly so they I mean these were incredibly large construction projects when you think about what they were dealing with in terms of technology and resources and so to be building temple after temple after temple after temple in a short period of time it's not really surprising when we start looking at these that we often see pieces that aren't totally finished there's not we start losing detail at a certain point and it's not that they've lost a tail it's that they kind of started to rough things in and then they could never quite got back to really doing the deeper stuff because the king decided he was going to build another temple and everyone had to go run off and do that one so what we see actually these are both from the Bayon is that there's these incredible murals on 2/3 of it and then all of a sudden there's nothing because they just kind of ran out of steam and so some of the thoughts about what happens to encore is connected to this idea that he overdid it he overextended himself much like Donald Trump and that he ended up in a situation in which it was not sustainable and that they were using up the labor that they had and that people were being forced to kind of tie their labor to the detriment of farm work and that this is part of the problem that group from the University of Sydney actually thinks that their problem was sprawl so that they were like the Phoenix of the sort of Middle Ages or something that they they had run into issues of sprawl and that they didn't have the resource network to deal with that kind of sprawl at one point this the the area around Angkor was like the most densely populated place in all of Southeast Asia for a good while so there were a lot of people there and there was an issue with density of population and sprawl and whether or not they had the resources to sustain that large of a group of people but after Jaya Berman the seventh there is this decline that occurs the Chum come back again at one point they go and they do a raid on the child and come back and there's sort of a little back-and-forth of that the Chama are actually kind of waning at this point as well the Vietnamese are pressing on them but it's actually really the decline at this point after Jive arm in the seventh of the n gorian Empire and eventually within we have a description from the 15th century by a Chinese trader named Jo Duk Hwan of what uncle was like and it still sounds like it was pretty fabulous he talks about there being you know golden decorations and all sorts of things but it certainly wasn't as fabulous as it had been the capital of the Khmer Empire is is shifted down lake at one point getting closer to what it where the capital is now infernal bang they go back up to uncle for a while in the 15th century and then they head back down the river to been open and then sort of stay there and encore is never the capital again after the 15th century and what eventually ends up happening is that they really just lose bits and pieces of power over time until by the 18th century the Siamese you have really risen in power and are kind of one of the big powerhouses in Southeast Asia the the Cambodians have them on one side and then they've got the Vietnamese on the other side who was the other big powerhouse in Southeast Asia and each one of them has taken a bite over the 18th century Cambodia actually was even smaller than it is now in by the late 18th early 19th century and actually Ankur wasn't in Cambodia from part of the all through the 19th century and into the early 20th century they didn't get back the the province of Battambang until the early 20th century and that occurs during the period in which the French are there the French begin doing things in Southeast Asia in the 1850s and in 1863 they take over what what's now left of Cambodia so we get these sorts of images when at this point this actually wasn't part of Cambodia this is before battambang came back but the French were very very interested in in a core and they did eventually have encore came back into Cambodia during the period when it was a colony of France and in the French really liked it so much that they put it in a lot of their advertising the thing that I like best is well that we have a sort of link it on the left which you know when I look at the bio and I always think of a Lincoln the other thing that we have on the right I love this one on the right where we have these kind of cartoon birds and the cartoon dead elephant on the on the right and it says hair and skin nothing will escape these cartridges so it's like an advertisement for shotgun shells with you know uncle watt in the background because again who doesn't think of shotgun shells from they see angora over the years there have been a lot of issues having to do with Cambodia being able to hold on to pieces of its cultural heritage the pieces are very very popular people love the sculpture and who wouldn't it's gorgeous but they steal it which is a real problem and so we have these sort of sad scenes like this at the cons of Essendon Gulf which is the storage where once people have started stealing things they'll take things and kind of put them in storage there where there's a guard that hangs out with them overnight but the whole sort of room with headless Buddha's that have lost their heads because people really really like the heads and in fact on the international art market a head is sometimes worth more than the whole thing so this is why we have all these headless Buddha's but you know the the Cambodia is extremely proud of its heritage and it is still a lot of the things that reflect that we see from those daily life images and a lot of that stuff is really a part of daily life still in Cambodia we see it in the flag this is the flag and we see uncle Wat is the the symbol on the flag today and there are the traditions of dance you on and so we have this image over here which is from the same template as pecan and this is a dance performance that I saw at pecan and I mean they're just it's it wonderful to see this in the not exactly the setting obviously in originally there would have been a roof and whole sorts of things but in that setting it's really amazing to sort of watch this performance going on while we have these images up here of the opposite uh that they are recreating here in sort of 3d and in color and so I encourage everybody to to be like my friend Adrian here and go visit all of the temples this is Monday samurai and to enjoy the the food of Cambodia including the crickets on the left and to just have a wonderful time at encore because it's well worth the trip [Applause] you

Channel: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Views: 69,417

Rating: 4.8376384 out of 5

Keywords: vmfa, virginia museum, angkor, angkor wat, jennifer foley

Id: JXk9RD-xFNw

Length: 70min 20sec (4220 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2009