By Chris Green for The Independent
It sounds like the plot of an Indiana Jones movie: an archaeology professor with little more to go on than a yellowing photograph discovers part of a 900-year-old statue deep in the Cambodian jungle, rewriting history in the process.
Dr Peter Sharrock, a senior teaching fellow in the art and archaeology of Southeast Asia at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, was at a conference in Cambodia in July when he decided to spend a day searching the forest around the ruins of Angkor.
His aim was to locate the missing giant legs of an eight-headed, three-metre high sandstone statue of Hevajra, the war-like, tantric Buddhist deity. The statue’s intricately carved bust was excavated and salvaged in 1925 by French archaeologists, who sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it has been on display ever since. The rest of the statue had not been found – until now.
Take ‘Le Grand tour d’Angkor-An Interactive Guide to The Temples of Angkor’ and see if you can find some more…
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