Palma's Place

Angkor Temples

Angkor, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Here is a slide show on YouTube, "A Passage Through Angkor" which I assembled from my best pictures.  Here is a downloadable copy of the show with much better resolution.

Angkor covers a 200 square kilometer area that contains over 40 accessible sites and probably 100s of more minor sites and ruins.  It is located at the north west end of Cambodia ’s great lake, the Tonal Sap, along the Siem Reap River .  The town of Siem Reap is the capital of Siem Reap province is 6km south of Angkor Wat. 

Angkor became the center of the Khmer empire around 800AD though it had been occupied long before.  The Khmer empire was called Kambuja, after a tribe from northern India that figures in Khmer mythology.  The area was originally called Yasodharapura. 

The Khmer capital shifted to several locations within this general Angkor area.  Angkor contains several ancient cities and including one with a population of nearly 100,000.  At its height in the 13^th century, Angkor Thom, the last great Angkor capital for the Khmer located just north of Angkor Wat, had a population of about 1 million people.

The name Angkor traces its origin to the Sanskrit word nagara (holy city).  In Thai, this word would have been pronounced as nakhon and was probably pronounced as nokor or ongkor in Khmer.  Wat is the Thai word for temple.  Ironically, Siem Reap translates to “the defeat of the Siamese,” since the down fall of the Khmer empire began with the rise to power of the Thais.

 Angkor Temples

 Other Resources

For reference I have included some other material including (forth coming)

Maps of Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia

Several maps that show the major sites within Angkor along with a historical map of pre-Angkor Cambodia

Satellite images of Angkor

Several maps of Luang Prabang

Several maps of Chaing Rai province:

Angkor Guide Book

I have used the following book as a basic guide to the temples of Angkor during the trip and as I organized these photos.  It also has a pretty good background on Khmer art and architecture, history, and reconstruction efforts at Angkor .  This book was also the primary source for the background I have included here.

Rooney, Dawn F., Angkor: An Introduction to the Temple, Odyssey Publications Ltd., Hong Kong , 1999.