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Category: Architecture
Format: Illustrated/Hardback
Dimension: 24 cms x 32,5 cms
Pages: 384
Price: 130 €
Year: 2010
Rights Sold: French
Signs: 600.000
Link: Link
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Review

Written by jacabook

Angkor, in modern Cambodia, is one of the most extraordinary places that tourists and scholars visit in Asia. Between the 9th and the 15th centuries, the Khmer civilization chose Angkor and the surrounding area as its politic and spiritual centre. Its palaces and temples glorified both the kings who had them built and their religion. Such a religion was constituted by a syncretism between Buddhism and Hinduism, the two great religions coming from India, where they have been always coexisting. There was even a syncretism between Shaivism and Vaishnavism. The sacredness of Angkor consists in huge architectures that are not only rich in sculptures, but themselves real monumental sculptures. The wonderful surrounding landscape, where they are placed, with canals and water basins, is like a wide garden, a perfect universe, a mirror of the Cosmos. The Ecole Française d’Extrême Orient (the French School of the Far East) used to carry out researches and restoration works in this site before the long Cambodian civil war stopped any archaeological activity. Therefore the only scientific reference work on the great architectural complex of Angkor is still the volume written by Maurice Glaize, who supervised the excavations from 1936 to 1945. His Angkor guide book, known as “Glaize’s guide” (1993), is now republished as a new critical edition edited and presented by Gilles Béguin, director of the Cernuschi Museum on Asian Art in Paris. The Glaize’s guide only showed black and white pictures, but in this new edition these photographs are replaced by images from one the most acknowledged photo archive on Angkor - and on Indian, Chinese and Southeast Asian art as well -, the one by Suzanne Held. Moreover this new edition includes plans and reconstructions of the different monuments. The final result is a definitive and indispensable Work for the comprehension of Angkor, the ultimate study for any further research.

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