OK, who are these guys? They’re at the very end of the Procession of the Queens in the Southern Gallery of Angkor Wat.
The first description I heard was, “These are happy villagers, following the procession.” What? Suryavarman II was at war. With the Cham, and with the Dai Viet. Everyone in the Procession of the Queens would have had some type of security clearance. “Happy villagers?” Definitely not.
Next I heard that they were men carrying rolled mats, to sit on when they’d reached the royal pūjā. I published that, because it came from a reliable source.
But a year later, I started to have second thoughts. Because security would have been so much of a concern, I knew that anyone in this procession had a reason to be there. What was theirs? I took a look at them again.
And suddenly, I remembered seeing something like what they were carrying. In an antique store. Message tubes, made into lamps. I went back to the store and asked if they had any message tubes in their original condition. They did. They told me that their stock was early-20th-century message tubes “used by the king”.
I bought one, and compared it to what the men were carrying. I thought I had a match. I thought the men were messengers.
When going through my 7,000+ photos to finish Through the Eyes of a Queen, I found another photo that I’d taken years before.
And there was my proof… Three men ahead of my guys, carry documents. The men carrying “rolled mats” were in fact carrying message tubes, because they were Sūryavarman II’s messengers.
Mystery solved? Not so fast. Had the antique store been right? Was what they’d sold me really a message tube?
In India, at the Shreyas Folk Museum in Ahmedabad, I found the Indian prototype of the Cambodian message tubes. With documents still inside.
Now, mystery solved. Many thanks to the Shreyas’ director, Dr. Hardika Raval, for sending me the photo!
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The 1860+ standing female figures on the walls of Angkor Wat are devatā. They were known by this appellation until around the 1960’s, when someone began calling them apsarā. “Apsarā” stuck.
I had learned many years ago from Preah Maha Vimaladhamma Pin-Sem Sirisuvanno (the Abbot of Wat Bo, Siem Reap, and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Angkorian civilization) that the correct appellation is devatā.
They appeared to me to be temple and palace staff. Servants. I asked D. S. Sood of Archeological Survey of India, then the head structural engineer for the Ta Prohn temple (since retired), what he thought. He said yes, they were servants. “May I quote you on that?” I asked. “Yes!”
I interviewed Pra Ratana Visuk Sithong Heng, the second-highest-ranking Cambodian monk in the United States, in 2024. And I mentioned how grateful I was to Preah Maha Pin-Sem for telling me all those years ago that the 1860+ standing female figures on the walls of Angkor Wat are devatā.
“Oh,” he said. “The servants in the royal palace in Phnom Penh are called devatā to this day.”
If you are a scholar, simply look up “devatā” in the Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary. It is the fourth definition that applies to these figures - not the first.