Angkor Wat Cambodia Part 1

Angkor Wat in Cambodia is beautiful and mysterious historical sites in the world. Angkor Wat Located over 192 miles to the North-West of Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh, Angkor Wat Cambodia has been "protected" from tourism, and the customs and the cultures of the people living there have not changed much. However, intense internal warfare for over fifty years has impacted on the people and to an extent on the physical structure of the temples at Angkor Wat Cambodia.

In 1991, the Khmer Rouge, the guerrilla movement, controlled the area. It was then very difficult to visit the area, and the only way to get there was by Helicopter from Phnom Penh Cambodia. I will never forget when I first got out from the Helicopter, and stepped into the land of history, a land which the western civilization had forgotten. In this paper, I would like to discuss the history of the great temples of the "lost city" of Angkor Wat Cambodia, but I would also like to describe some of my own observations from the summer of 1991.

For many years, Angkor Wat Cambodia was totally isolated from the Western World. Large, thick jungles covers the area Angkor Wat located in the center of Cambodia. The French colonialists were the first westerners to get exposed to Angkor. They heard rumors from the local population about "temples built by gods or by giants." Most of the colonialists referred these rumors to folk tales, but some believed that there really was a "lost city of a Cambodian empire", which had once been powerful and wealthy.

The Angkor Wat Cambodia temples were first discovered by French missionaries in 1860. Henri Mahout, a French botanist started intensive research and restoration programs.

These research efforts continued until 1968, when the Vietnam war disrupted the studies. Initially, he did not believe that the temples were built by Cambodians, but by another race which had concurred and occupied Cambodia for over 2000 years ago. His theory would later be proven to be incorrect, after that researchers discovered scripts on the walls of the temples, and stone sculptures, that have made it possible for archeologists to piece together the history of Cambodia. Now it is known that Angkor Wat, was the great capital city of the Khmer empire from the city's founding in about AD 880 until about 1225.
Angkor Wat Cambodia Part 2
Angkor Wat Cambodia Part 3

Source: www.geocities.com