Temples of Cambodia
The Heart of Angkor
Helen Ibbitson Jessup


The temples of Cambodia are among the most complex and imposing architectural creations in the world, offering nothing less than the embodiment of Khmer culture. Over a period of five hundred years, from the seventh to the twelfth centuries, successive rulers sought to build sacred spaces that bore witness to the presence of the gods and the legitimacy of the kings. This volume invites the reader to experience that remarkable architectural and spiritual achievement through extraordinary photographs and a text by a leading Khmer cultural historian.

Organized chronologically, the book opens with the modestly scaled brick structures of the seventh and eighth centuries and goes on to explore the first monumental temple mountains of the ninth century, the technical advances enabling the fulfillment of a unique Khmer architectural vision in the tenth, and the erection of the ambitious Baphuon temple mountain, among others, in the eleventh, all setting the stage for the apogee of the Khmer empire in the twelfth century, and with it, the construction of three massive temple complexes: Beng Mealea, Bakan, and the supreme architectural creation of Cambodia, Angkor Wat.