Identities of the mysterious Asian women carved into the 12th century Cambodian temple may finally be revealed.
Angkor Wat contains 12th century portraits of 1,796 individual women. They were clearly part of a "social network". American researcher Kent Davis asks "Was this temple an ancient Facebook"?
Andrew Buncombe reports from Asia for the UK Independent
Angkor, Cambodia — Amid the splendour of the 12th-century temple of Angkor Wat, they stand and stare like silent sentinels, sensuous rather than erotic, carved with elegance and care. But exactly who are these 1,796 mysterious women and why, more than a century after Cambodia’s famed Hindu temple was rediscovered by Western archaeologists, did it take the efforts of an amateur researcher from Florida to push experts into trying to resolve the puzzle?
Researcher Kent Davis at Angkor Wat.
Though Kent Davis had lived in South-east Asia during the 1990s, he did not have an opportunity to see Angkor Wat until 2005. Like most visitors to the huge complex in the centre of the Cambodia, for many years cut off from the outside world because of the presence of the Khmer Rouge, he was mesmerised by the experience.
But he was also left with a flurry of questions. “I went to Angkor as a tourist and I was startled when I got there and saw these women,” said Mr Davis, 54, a publisher and writer who now lives near Tampa, Florida. “I was not prepared for it. The human element of them struck me and I wanted to know who they were. I asked one of the guides and he said they were there to serve the king after he went to heaven.”
Mr Davis’s interest was tweaked, so he wanted to know more. He vowed he would return to the US and investigate. Yet when he got home he found there was essentially nothing written about these women, who appear throughout the temple complex in full body carvings.
The women of Angkor Wat appear to include different Asian ethnicities.
Indeed, the only study of the female carvings he could find had been made in the early 20th century by Sappho Marchal, the daughter of Frenchman Henri Marchal, then the curator of the temple site. Frustrated but intrigued, he decided he would find out for himself. Five years and several trips to Angkor later, Mr Davis has slowly begun to get some answers.
MSU researchers plotted 130 identification points on each face.
In 2008, he asked for the help of computer experts from the University of Michigan. That team was able to conduct facial mapping experiments on digital photographs of the women, or devatas. The team, whose findings were presented last month at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, an academic convocation in Istanbul, concluded that there were at least eight different facial types, perhaps reflecting a variety of ethnicities in the Khmer kingdom.
The results are to be examined further by archaeologists and more computer mapping is planned. But for all the effort that went into the mapping, the results of which were published in DatAsia magazine, many questions about the women remain unanswered.
“It’s a 12th century Facebook,
but no one has ever heard of this social network.”
“There are almost 1,800 faces there,” said Mr Davis, who now uses 65 separate characteristics to define the individual women in a devata database. “It’s a 12th century Facebook, but no one has ever heard of this social network. This was the biggest temple the Khmer people ever built. It is still the largest religious structure on Earth! It must have been important to them because they threw everything into it. They would have only put their most important images into it; these women must have been incredibly important to the kingdom.”
Mr Davis wrote to universities, pestered experts, and sought the opinions of people from around the globe who had worked at Angkor. Trude Jacobson, an assistant professor of history at the University of Queensland, Australia, and author of Lost Goddesses: Denial of Female Power in Cambodian History, said: “Kent is an enthusiastic researcher of a question that everyone assumed was settled long ago, or doesn’t matter.
Each of the 1,796 women at Angkor Wat is unique.
“The history of women in Cambodia, until very recently, has been one in which they were relegated to the shadows. His interest is infectious and has made others more interested in questions of gender in an otherwise heavily masculinised historical inquiry.”
What has struck Mr Davis as he has continued his enquiries, is that for all the women at Angkor there are relatively few male carvings.”Could these different women represent the different professions of the Khmer kingdom?” he said. “Could they be scholars, agriculturalists? I think they must represent the most important women in the kingdom.”
Dr Peter Sharrock, an expert on South-east Asia at London’s School of African and Oriental Studies, has studied the temples around Angkor for years. “We understand [the female carvings] little but they play a major role in the architectural sculpture of these temples, which must imply a major role in the beliefs of the ancient Khmers and in the rituals in their temples,” he said.
“Khmer descent was primarily matrilineal, and Khmer women were literate and powerful. Many were queens, and most kings base their genealogies and claims to the throne on their female ancestors. The ancient Khmers venerated the goddess Prajnaparamita in the most elaborate cult to her known anywhere in Asia. So there are fundamental questions here about an exceptional female religious and regal role in ancient Cambodia that remain unanswered.”
Despite 150 years of experts purporting that the women of Angkor Wat are imaginary, Davis contends that they are realistic, accurate portraits of actual women who were members of the royal Khmer court.
Professor Jacobson believes the images were part of a broader iconography relating to the supernatural world. “The devatas, placed either side of doorways, were guards who monitored who was permitted access from the mundane world to the supernatural,” she said.
“[Those] represented as flying or dancing, were responsible for leading the souls of the dead to the supernatural world from the battlefield. The models for the images at Angkor were doubtless members of the royal family.”
Despite the abundance of women at Angkor Wat, not a single man is honored with the same type of portrait carving.
Mr Davis said he was dedicated to trying to throw greater light on the mystery of the carvings by working with the team of researchers he has cultivated. At this point, he said, starting to analyse the images was like “being the first person to get a map to the British Museum and the keys to the front door”.
He added: “Once we define facial types more thoroughly, an incredibly exciting prospect appears. If these images are portraits of actual people, it’s logical to assume that they had children within this region, and that creates the possibility of using facial pattern recognition on people living in this area to see if facial shapes and types seen at Angkor still live here. We could actually find the descendants of some of the sacred women in the temple.”
Angkor Wat, the icon of Cambodia's Khmer Empire reflects in a sacred pond.
Angkor Wat – Symbol of a nation
- The sprawling temple complex of Angkor Wat, located amid dense jungle and close to the city of Siem Reap, was built in the early 12th century and is one of a series of stunning palaces and temples that were built over a 400-year period by the Khmer Kingdom.
- Today, the temples attract up to a million tourists a year, but for many years the remarkable buildings were unknown to the West, which only “rediscovered” them in the 19th century. During the 1970s and 1980s they were off-limits as a result of the presence of the Khmer Rouge, the Maoist-inspired rebels who ruled Cambodia from 1975-79 and who then engaged in a bitter civil war for the next two decades.
- Angkor Wat itself, the most impressive and best-preserved of the complexes, was built for King Suryavarman II in the early part of the 12th century and is dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. It has since become a symbol of Cambodia, even appearing on its national flag.
Angkor Wat at dawn.
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wonderful mesmerizing photos, they speak to across the gulf of time
My personal take on this is they are indeed individual photos of women of that time. You can see the difference in each face and it was their way of showing the women and their roles of that majestic place.
I agree with you 100% Mary. But what’s obvious to us has truly been missed or ignored by expert archaeologists for 150 years! The women of Angkor Wat are a social record of great importance…but they’ve just been brushed off as fantasy. Please keep an eye on the site for more details in the coming months. We are consulting with medical doctors and geneticists who also believe that these carvings represent real women, and not imaginary angels.
The exciting challenge is solving the intriguing puzzle of who these women were and what they represented within the Khmer society. Please join the investigation and keep your ideas coming!
Dear Kent, just realized your comment and Thank you! I lived in Cambodia for 11 1/2 years and still have family both American and Khmer there. i have great hopes to see Angkor Wat first hand this summer. My daughter who is married to a Cambodian Official went there over the New year Holiday and she was in Awe. There is one Apsara that I am quite fond of and she found her for me and had her picture taken next to her. I will be waiting with great anticipation for more updates as I also do research.
I’m also looking forward to your book “Daughters of Angkor Wat”.!
What if Fb did not exist? U would compare to myspace? Dumb dumb do not compare angkor wat to cheap social networking site
This is marvelous. Thank you Kent for sharing this. Looking forward to your further research.
Thank you Bopha.
And to AhPier…there are 750 million *active* Facebook users (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics). Also note that there are less than 15 million Cambodians. It is hard to call that concept “dumb”. And quite clearly this new form of social media is changing the planet.
In their day, I believe that the women represented at Angkor Wat also changed their world.
My problem is that I am a researcher trying to preserve and honor Khmer heritage by conveying the importance of Angkor Wat’s women to the *modern* world. I don’t know where you live but rest assured that most people on Earth have not heard of Angkor Wat and could not find Cambodia on a map.
Sadder still, most people who visit Angkor Wat don’t realize the artistic and cultural significance of these women because they have never been studied. Thanks for sharing your comment.
PS – Angkor Wat and Facebook are cooler than MySpace (-:
Dear Kent, first of all I would like to thank you for your research and interest in my culture the women of Angkor. I am writing an article on what it means to be a Khmer woman in the ancient times and modern time. As a modern Khmer woman who survived rape and violence at the hands of Khmer men since I was a little girl, the women sculpted on the temples had different meanings to me, but I am open to new ideas. The women of Cambodia have experienced great abuse and oppression at the hands of men for centuries, used as sexual objects with no honor in the modern time as evidenced by the human trafficking and sex slavery existing today. Men have affairs and countless mistresses in Cambodia and is socially accepted from the peasant class all the way to the Prime Minister. Anyhow, your site is definitely crucial in my quest towards finding the true identity of my ancestral lineage. Thanks again for your passion in uncovering the history and identity of the women of Angkor. Love and light to you. Namaste!
Dear Reasmeiy,
Thank you for your powerful comment. Please tell me when your article is finished so we may link to it. It appears to me that the ancient Khmer society held great respect for women and that women were equal to men in their areas of responsibility. In that society, women also held political, social and economic power.
This is evidenced in the records of Zhou Daguan and, more important, in the Khmer inscriptions themselves. Two researchers I recommend to read are Trudy Jacobsen (http://www.devata.org/2009/10/words-about-women-in-khmer-history-earthly-and-divine-vocabulary/) and Phalika Ngin
(http://www.devata.org/2010/09/ancient-queens-who-shaped-an-asian-empire-indradevi-and-jayarajadevi/ ) but you’ll find other articles here too.
Thank you for sharing your ideas.
Kent
Kent,
I just came across your site while googling something about Khmer women and thought I should make some comments. I am a Khmer woman, born and raised in Cambodia, but American educated. From my understanding, the modern Khmer culture differs very greatly from Khmer Angkorian culture. And my theory in explaining this is the mystery of the collapse of the Khmer Empire. Clearly, something “planned” by someone took place. After the collapse of the empire, things changed dramatically. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the story of Ta Trosok Plaem, in English the Sweet Cucumber man. This man became king after her killed a real Varman king who was a relative of King Jayavarman VII. The story sounds unbelievable and this man had no real name–a complete mystery. Since then our society has become completely different. Look at us today. We follow a different religion (I’m a Buddhist myself, so this is not to say Buddhism is bad or anything). We can’t read any script from the past. And I highly doubt if we would be able to understand the language spoken back then.
What Reasmeiy described is pretty much the modern culture of Cambodia today. But the history of the Khmers goes back to the 1st century if not earlier. Our first head of state was a woman, known as Neang Neak (or as some call her Soma). Thus, Khmer women did hold equal power to (if not more than) men. Also, do keep in mind that the word “Khmer” is driven from the word “mer.” In Khmer language, “mer” means mother or female depending on the context in which it is used.
Recently, I’ve started to noticed the change in the Khmer view of women not only in regard to power but also other aspects. Less than a month ago, I saw some pictures taken in Phnom Penh in late 1800s or early 1900s. What shocked me was the women in the pictures. The least accessorized women ever! Even the wives of the king! Looking back to the women of Angkor Wat, my impression was that they were over accessorized. Then I asked myself, “What changed?” And the only thing I could think of was that Angkorian women were goddesses in the eyes of Khmer men who built Angkor Wat. They appreciated that beauty of these women (inside and outside). In recent history, on the other hand, Khmer women have been undermined. I remember growing up in Cambodia, if someone said to a Khmer girl that she looked Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian, White, or anything else other than Khmer, it was a complement. I was generally regarded as a beautiful girl, but I looked Khmer, and nobody wanted to link the two factors together. I remember a friend (who’s also Cambodian but part Vietnamese) asked if I was part Chinese and I said no. Her response was, “Yes, but you must be a mix of something else. No pure blood Khmer can look this beautiful.” Although it was a complement to me individually, I felt so hurt when she made such a comment that degraded my race.
Sorry, I went on and on and probably got off the topic a little bit. The bottom line is I believe that Khmer women had a high role in the Angkorian society. Also, somebody told me a story that I’m not sure myself if it was true or not. But the story goes like this: Once upon a time, Khmers were at war with Thais. Khmer soldiers led by Khmer king were captured by Thai soldiers. Knowing that all Khmer soldiers were captured at the battlefield and not many men left the capital, Thai soldiers came straight to the Angkor City with the intention to take over the city that was pretty much left with only women and children. Alerted about this, Khmer women in the city dressed up as men and fought Thai soldiers and defeated them. They later even went to the battlefield to rescue the men. And that’s how after that many things done in Khmer culture were to honor the bravery of Khmer women whom were believed to have both the feminine beauty and the feminine strength. Again, this is probably just a fairly tale.
Thanks!
Continuing the Discussion