Our biggest problem - both yours and mine - in looking back into the civilization of Angkor is the misinformation that has been published about it. Much of it is in coffee-table books, where the photographs are dazzling but the scholarship is often lacking. But scholars have made mistakes, too. In Through the Eyes of a Queen - the Women of the Royal Court at Angkor you’ll find a chapter entitled “Angkor Unscrambled!”, in which I’ve attempted to do a bit of unscrambling and give credit to those scholars who got it right.
Here’s an example. As you read on the “Theories Already Proven” tab, the 1860+ standing figures at Angkor Wat once correctly called devatā are now called apsarā. As if that weren’t bad enough, so are the yakshī. We see yakshī on almost every Angkorian temple, from Preah Ko in 879 C.E. to the last temple built in the Preah Pithu group more than three centuries later. They’ve all been misidentified as apsarā.
Misinformation spreads. Faster than Covid-19. Early in 2025 I went to Surin, Thailand, and studied the female figures at some of the Angkorian temples there. What I found was that the yakshī are now called apsarā. This misidentification spread from Cambodia to another country!
Once the bad information is out there, it’s picked up by other scholars. They republish it, and it skews their research. It gets into theses, magazine articles, encyclopedias… Then AI picks it up. And when it gets into Wikipedia? Game Over.
But often, it’s easy to get it right. Take a look.
Some scholars have written that the Khmer alphabet evolved from Brahmi, others have said from Devanāgarī, and others have said from Pallava. Having studied Khmer, Sanskrit, and Cambodian and Indian history, I thought the answer must be Pallava. This is a comparison table I prepared for my readers:
The answer jumps right off the page. Why is this of such monumental importance? It underscores the magnitude of the influence of the Pallavas of South India on the emerging Cambodian civilization.
I got the information on the four alphabets from the Internet. It didn’t take more than 15 minutes.