Angkor Complex Online
The Angkor Complex is a large collection of ruins in
northern Cambodia. The Angkor Complex houses many different
structures which served as the capitals of the immense Khmer Empire at
different times between the 9th and 15th centuries. The whole Angkor area
consists of many spectacular temples. The main temple groups are
Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and Bayon temple.
From Angkor, the Khmer kings ruled over a vast
domain that reached from Vietnam to China to the Bay of Bengal. The structures
one sees at Angkor today, more than 100 stone temples in all, are the
surviving remains of a grand religious, social and administrative metropolis
whose other buildings - palaces, public buildings, and houses - were built of
wood and are long since decayed and gone.
The earliest of these scholars could not believe that Angkor had
been built by the Cambodian people, believing the temples to have been built by
another race who had conquered and occupied Cambodia maybe 2,000 years before.
Gradually, some of the mysteries were explained, the Sanskrit inscriptions
deciphered and the history of Angkor slowly pieced together, mainly by
French scholars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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