Narratives of War and Daily Life

In some ways, the coy smiles of the 200 some odd Buddha’s , criss crossing Angkor Tom’s spires in Cartesian precision across the 4 cardinal dimensions, have the same allure of the Mona Lisa’s famous expression. As I said in Interlude 2, they preside over forgotten stories. The know secrets that they will not tell. If you close your eyes and try to reconstruct a city of nearly a million people on these grounds…a Rome built into a jungle…you can only begin to imagine the scene let alone the story.

But this is part of what makes the Khumer ruins so special. The wall carvings (called bass reliefs) record stills of the content those stories may have actually contained.

This is why, after my experience with the murals at Angkor Wat (particularly the South East sections and their story of beginning and end…creation and destiny), I cut short the standard circuit of ‘minor temples’ to go back and returned to Angkor Tom[1] at the end of the day to add narrative to the pictures I had stared at with limited recognition the day before. The Baylon temple at Angkor Tom (the one with all the heads on the spires) boasts more footage of murals than Angkor Wat. There are some of lesser quality that surround the structure itself and tell many of the standard religious narratives that became familiar in the region’s iconography, but the most interesting ones told the story of Khumer warfare and daily life (often juxtaposed vertically on the same wall to create the narrative effect that daily life continued unaware of the heroism and courage required to maintain it.

And this, in my opinion, is part of the ‘greatness’ of these artifacts. They humanize their great monuments with the stories of their people, both ordinary and extraordinary. And carefully ‘reading’[2] these stories seemed like a fitting way to close my visit to this great an quiet (if not entirely silent) city.

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[1] And sometimes you have to divert from the standard tourist itinerary once your recognize a richness that tends to be missed. My basic advice if you have limited time at Angkor, spend more time at a few rather than trying to whirlwind them all.

[2] I used Freeman and Jacques “Ancient Angkor” to walk panel by panel through the reliefs, trying to pick out the images they highlighted like a sort of treasure hunt, and once I knew what I was looking at, trying to find my own. This little book probably enhanced the overall experience 30-50%.