Friday, July 11, 2008
Angkor Wat: For hundreds of years, the lost city of Angkor (Khmer) was itself a legend. Khmer peasants living on the edge of the thick jungle around the Tonle Sap lake reported findings which puzzled the French colonialists who arrived in Indo China in the 1860s. Khmer Angkor Wat History, French Found Khmer Greatest Temple. read more about Khmer Angkor Wat. Khmer Documentary of Angkor Wat,Sanskrit Inscriptions deciphered History of Angkor Wat. watch the history of Angkor Wat
The peasants said they had found "temples built by gods or by giants." Their stories were casually dismissed as folktales by the pragmatic Europeans. Yet some did believe that there really was a lost city of a Khmer empire which had once been powerful and wealthy, but had crumbled many years before. Henri Mahout's discovery of the Angkor temples in 1860 opened up this `lost city' to the world. The legend became fact and a stream of explorers, historians and archaeologists came to Angkor to explain the meaning of these vast buildings. The earliest of these scholars could not believe that Angkor had been built by the Khmer people, believing the temples to have been built by another race who had conquered and occupied Khmer 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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