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The marvels of ancient Angkor

Buddhist monks and other Cambodians protest at the White House on MLK day. They had dictator Hun Sen firmly in their sites. The former Khmer Rouge official now is prime minister.
Buddhist monks and other Cambodians protest at the White House on MLK day. They had dictator Hun Sen firmly in their sights. The former Khmer Rouge official now is prime minister.

My obsession with Cambodia began in the early ’90s in a stack of books at the Birmingham Post-Herald. I was ferreting through the review copies looking for something to read when I spotted To Destroy You Is No Loss, which details Teeda Butt Mam’s struggle to survive Pol Pot’s rein of terror in Cambodia. I’d been vaguely aware of the Khmer Rouge’s Holocaust, but this made it so human, so flesh and blood.

I think I came across the late, great Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia around the same time.

My Cambodia obsession snowballed from there as I devoured survivor accounts, histories (including Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over) and a biography of Pol Pot. I also grew fascinated with ancient Khmer history and the incredible architecture of Angkor Wat.

That’s what landed me in a subterranean lecture hall at the Smithsonian in D.C. earlier this week listening to historian Robert DeCaroli’s Urban Architecture in Ancient Angkor: Old Temples and New Findings. While D.C. was shivering in a Polar Vortex up at street level, I was reviving my dream of going to tropical Cambodia to explore these ruins. It’s been on my list for a long time. Perhaps 2014 is the time …

Several interesting tidbits I picked up …

  • Ancient Angkor was the Dallas/Fort Worth of its day, boasting urban sprawl and low density development around a series of urban centers. DeCaroli said a professor of his once compared the development pattern to pot of boiling oatmeal where bubbles (urban centers) rise and fall.
  • The audience (me included) gasped when DeCaroli projected the image of a footless Hindu warrior and then the image below, showing the feet of pilfered statues that still remain at the original site.  The looted,  footless staLooted statue's feettue was put up for sale at Sotheby’s until international outrage prompted them to pull it and return it to Cambodia.
  • Drought is believed to have been a key cause of the decline of Khmer society, reminding me of a similar fate the Anasazi met in the American Southwest. It also explains the obsession with water — retention, management, irrigation, transportation — in Angkor.
  • Varman (armor or protector) is a suffix on the rulers’ names. For some reason, knowing that is making it easier for me to get my head around the individual rulers who built the temples.
  • Buddhism really didn’t enter Khmer architecture in a major way until Jayavarman VII built the Bayon temple, mashing up HIndu and Buddhist themes. But this was toward the end of the Khmer empire.
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Art Bob Assorted Bob Transition Bob

The Dying Gaul

The Dying Gaul
I’ve been the the National Gallery of Art several times since the holidays. Every time, I’ve stopped to marvel at The Dying Gaul in the rotunda of the West Building. This morning, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece by Catesby Leigh on the sculpture that helps verbalize the visceral sense I had of why this is an incredible work. If you’re in D.C. while this is on display, make sure you stop by to check it out.

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Art Bob Assorted Bob Transition Bob

Alexander’s big adventure

Plaque with the Ascension of Alexander the GreatSo this is really strange …

While I was drifting around in the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition, Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections, I stumbled across this image of Alexander the Great ascending into the heavens. Here’s a description, taken directly from the exhibit:

Alexander the Great (356 – 323 BC) truly became a legend in his own time. Having conquered much of the known world, he was said to have explored realms beneath the sea and in the sky. According to the Romance of Alexander, he ascended to the heavens in a basket attached to two starving griffins, mythical winged beasts. To make them leap ever higher into the sky, Alexander held two sticks with meat at the ends just above their heads. This plaque was found in the Byzantine fortifications of Chalikis on the island of Euboea, but it’s original use is unknown.