Angkor.

A little flesh, a little breath, and a reason to rule all - that is myself - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations I am the beginning, middle and end of creation - Krishna, Bhagavad Gita Humidity Φ 99%

Around 800 AD, about the same time as Charlemagne was proclaimed Emperor of Frankish Europe, Jayavarman II was consecrated as the divine King of Kings in today's Cambodia, thereby founding the Kingdom of Angkor. Its remaining temples are a major attraction with travelers arriving from all over the world to take part in the ancient Khmer culture and legacy. So what is there to see? What can we compare it to, and what can it possibly mean to us today? Siem Reap, backpacker's café. These places are the same all over the world, standardized like Starbuck's or KFC; From Cape Town to Peru, New Delhi to Beijing, Sydney to Brussels, these cafés offer free wifi and fair trade coffee, soya chai latte, soft cushions with oriental patterns along warmly lit walls, sandal wood incense and Norah Jones playing softly on the stereo. A German couple is examining their headlamps and trekking gear for the next day's adventure, two girls with dreadlocks chat away in Milanese accent by a table laden with paperback novels left behind by other travelers - The Beach by Alex Garland, Shantaram by G.D. Roberts and Pirzigs classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The words Carpe Diem are written in huge letters on the wall behind the gilded Buddha statue. A young American at the bar with shaved, slightly sunburned head and a red clay dot between his eyebrows, vows to the girl behind the counter that he is never going back to Harvard and that's it. "The place is a prison!" he exclaims. The girl nods understandingly, sporting a similar dot on her forehead. In the doorway stands a bearded Scandinavian, muddy backpack at his feet and a puzzled look on his face. Norah Jones stops singing and Jack Johnson's Better Together comes through the sound system. I just need a room. It is swiftly arranged at the counter and I'm offered a clay dot to be applied to my forehead, which I politely decline - and step out into the street again. From the pleasantly perfumed and air-conditioned interior of the hostel bar, it feels like stepping into a warm, humid mouth that has stayed away from the tooth brush for a while. I have a good feeling about this. * * * The early Khmer Language was brought to today's Cambodia by the farming communities from the Yangzi Valley in today's China and a civilization was formed through the 500 BC Iron Age of this area. The culture strengthened through peaks of development around 150 AD and from 550 AD onwards, with competing centers at the core area of Angkor. The name Angkor derives from the Sanskrit nagara meaning 'holy city' or 'city pagoda'. Temples were continuously built in this area over a period of at least seven centuries until the abandonment of the site around 1430. With time, the jungle swallowed the remains of a once thriving civilization that would not be rediscovered for over a hundred years. What lies here today is an extensive and astonishing site of temples and temple cities dating from different eras of Khmer civilization, remarkably well kept and varied in style. To the first Portuguese visitors arriving here in the 16th century, the discovery must have been no less than magical. Today the site is a focal point of the modern Cambodian culture and its historical attraction can hardly leave any visitor unimpressed.

The airport at Siem Reap serves visitors to the Angkor compound, an area of over 400 square kilometers, boasting ancient temples, hydraulic structures, and communication routes. Interested visitors will easily find it worthwhile to stay up to a week or more, to fully take in the temple towns and their legacy. Most famous among these is Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious monument, with dimensions and stone elaborations that are worthwhile visiting at different times of the day - sunrise, noon and sundown giving surprisingly different light and color impressions of the building and its premises.

Built as a microcosm of the Hindu universe, the five-lotus formation of Angkor Wat is enclosed by a laterite and sandstone moat which represents the mythical oceans surrounding the earth. Concentric galleries represent the mountain ranges around Mount Meru, the home of the Gods. At the center is Vishnu, appearing in different avatars - incarnations of a God as a human or animal - and who is believed to restore harmony and preserve universal order. Angkor Wat is not the oldest temple of the ancient Angkorian state, though it is the biggest, and when erected in the early 12th century, it enabled the Khmer to give full expression to religious symbolism. Angkor Wat is the temple and mausoleum of King Suryavarman II. Instead of facing the East, the direction of the rising sun, the entrance is oriented towards the West, the direction of the setting sun. This is unusual within the tradition, and has given rise to much speculation. Could it be that the temple was dedicated to Vishnu, who is sometimes associated with the west? Or might the setting sun orientation of the entrance mean suggest that Ankor Wat was in fact intended to be the temple of Death?

The complex was built around the same time that the first universities were being founded in Europe and the Middle East, and just before the early stages of Notre Dame cathedral was constructed in Paris - at the former location of the Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter. This was nearly 11 centuries after the Colosseum was built in Rome, and a little less than 500 years prior to the completion of the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. The Angkor cluster of temples and the surrounding culture developed into a thriving agricultural power that seems to have had its peak between 1050 and 1220 AD, roughly parallel to the time of Europe's battle of Hastings in 1066 to the adventures of Frederik Barbarossa and the signing of Magna Carta. * * * The agricultural mega city state that took shape in this part of the world had an exquisite position for transport, trade and cultural exchange with other countries. The swampy jungles of Cambodia protected as well as isolated the Angkor civilization to the north and west, yet its position between the two giants of the Silk Road - China and India - and the sea offered a highway to a lucrative international trade with the Arabic coastal markets. The Silk Road of the far away deserts surely meant a great deal to this nation during its heyday, enjoyed during a period of relative military weakness and economic growth in China before the military expansion of Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan. The latter established the Yuan dynasty in China. The Venetian Marco Polo claims to have visited his court. A recurring question regarding the Angkorian state concerns its historical connections to other cultures, such India. Gods from the Hindu pantheon, like Shiva and Vishnu, play a seminal role, as well as the use of Sanskrit - the priestly language of Hinduism. The symbolism of the temples at Angkor also seem to reflect the universe as expressed in the sacred Hindu texts, the Puranas. Buddhism - also originating in India - has clearly had a big cultural influence. Even Islamic influences seem to have come here through trade during the renaissance of Arabic culture, that in part coincided with the Angkorian cultural renaissance. * * * As always in human existence, nothing works without water. As the population grew and villages developed into towns, more food had to be grown. Irrigation water was brought to the fields by various methods, controlling the land by draining etc. Reservoirs may have been used to irrigate rice fields, generating three or four harvests a year, although this has been debated among archeologists. By the time of the Thai invasion and the subsequent abandonment of Angkor in the 15th century, food supplies were perhaps low, military organization might have failed or inner struggle for power may have weekend the state, splitting unity etc. We cannot know for sure - as even to the people present when it happens, the reasons behind the downfall of a society might be obscure and difficult to understand.

The stone-face adorned portals of Angkor Thom, the exquisite stucco facades and pilasters at Angkor Wat , to the Boddhisattvas of Bayon, Ta Prohm all but devoured by jungle vegetation, view from Phnom Chisor and the elegant naga (snake) balustrades by the lake at Srah Srang, a visitor at Angkor will notice how different one set of temples is from another. As evening lowers itself into the lake, these stone figures are still feverishly warm after a hot and humid day.

The Boddhisattva faces, usually made as a bust or portal with two or four faces on one head, represent those - possibly kings - who willingly stopped short of reaching Buddha-hood in order to help humanity search for harmony. Apsaras are female celestial dancers, carved into the walls to ensure that the deified king is suitably accompanied on his way to paradise. Just like the Sistine Chapel painted by Michelangelo a few centuries later, these temples are full of mythical figures engaged in scenes and events that make up the mythology of their civilization. A visitor to the Vatican may note the similarity between the recurring double faces of Angkor and the ubiquitous multitude of stone faces of the Roman god Janus, depicted with two faces pointing in opposite directions. With one face looking to the future and the other to the past, Janus is thought to preside over beginnings and ends, war and peace, conflict and harmony.

A modern, practically minded person might ask, "What's the point of all this?" Does it matter? Every ancient society seems to have been engaged in different ways of making its mark and showing what it believed in, but to whom? Possibly just to themselves, or perhaps to anyone other than themselves. The absurdity or geniality of what we do today is likely to be judged differently by posterity than we'd think and hope for. Maybe it is beside the point, given that the meaning we're trying to express matters now, in the making of today's truth, rather than at sometime in the future. The actual meaning of stone faced Boddhisattvas and dancing apsaras may well have been very different to the ancients that the meaning we glean through in hindsight. to those present back then may have been different from the official version we get in hindsight. This is part of Cognitive Archeology, the study of past ways of thought as gathered from the surviving material remains of a society. We look at what has been found in the jungle and try to draw conclusions regarding how a society perceived their reality. The very principles of their lives, we can find in ourselves: They needed food and shelter, they had some kind of rudimentary - or advanced - economy and defense system, they probably wished to live happily with friends and family, occasionally indulging in what they felt was the Dolce Vita. They clearly had religious views and thoughts of a higher good in life, and they probably had an idea of love.

The art that a civilization leaves behind gives later generations a chance to peek into the minds of earlier generations. Through Processual Archeology we can draw conclusions from the changes and processes that earlier societies underwent and about the problems we ourselves might be facing in the future. It is like an autopsy of the past civilization, an extraction of long-gone realities in the quarries of time. Professor Sir E.H. Gombrich reasonably underscores that there is scarcely any building in the world which was not erected for a particular purpose, and that image-making is not just the expression of magic and religion, but the first form of writing. The old Egyptian term for "sculptor" is said to mean "He-that-keeps-alive" which says a lot of what art can be. The great philosopher Socrates was himself trained as a sculptor, and spoke of the mission of this occupation as to represent the workings of the soul by observations of the feelings expressed by bodies in motion. Our inner qualities can be viewed and artistically expressed in different ways. Michelangelo brought the idea of a field study to new depths by acquiring dead bodies from burial sites in order to study the inner structures of muscles, bones, joints, teeth and sculls. We can imagine the models of Angkorian apsaras dancing and smiling on their procession to some other, divine world. But where was that, according to them? Where is the actual Mount Meru located? Did the people of Angkor have an idea of the distance between themselves and the holy mountain, or to the moon for that matter? What would the people still living here in the early thirteen hundreds have thought if they knew that they found themselves halfway in time between the coronation of their great Jayavarman II and the first human moon landing? We will never know, though it renders a certain weight and perspective to the human experience. * * * When the Khmer Rouges seized power in Cambodia in the 1970's following the civil war, some of the mythical and rightfully respected traditions of the Khmer civilization was used by the regime for political purposes. The leader Pol Pot claimed the architecture, art and historical splendor of his native country as a legacy supporting his rule. This is the trick often used in history, of invoking something familiar and established from the past in order to control the present and future; like the old Roman greeting - perhaps more known to us as the Nazi salute - and symbols like the Swastika being used in Europe during the thirties and forties. In George Orwell's famous words, "Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past." What makes history important to us in the end is not which king sits upon the equestrian statue, or in what year this or that happened. Rather, we try to protect the actual value in our heritage, and to not allow that value to be hijacked by political agendas. Cambodia suffered greatly during the war that raged from 1969 to 1975. Pol Pot came into power and the country plunged into an increasingly desperate state. The Killing Fields, a film based on the experiences of journalists Dith Pran and Sydney Schanberg, is an attempt to capture some of these events. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) made Angkor a World Heritage Site in 1992, and has since worked with local authorities to preserve the historical site and keep tourism sustainable. With great scores of visitors coming here annually, interests naturally clash between preservation on the one hand and making a living in a poor country on the other. Visitors to Angkor are advised to take this into consideration, as Cambodia's economy is heavily dependent upon tourism, yet the country needs to keep its heritage intact. Most Visitors spend up to a week in Siem Reap, visiting the temple grounds north of town at sunrise, taking a midday rest and later continuing their exploration through the afternoon into sunset. These are the magical hours of the temples, somewhere between timeless presence and the restless letters on the hostel wall urging us to seize the day before it rushes into another. * * * It is still dark, and the rugged wilderness by the hostel veranda is alive with nocturnal bugs and rodents congregating in the cool morning fog before heading off to sleep. Mopeds buzz by on the dirt road on their way to pick up visitors to the temples. Hot black coffee before I go, the letters on the cup read Star Bugs. Dark clouded skies are paling and Norah Jones keeps singing through the speakers in the hall - Come Away with Me.