Sdok Kok Thom
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Sdok Kok Thom is an 11th Century Khmer temple located near the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet. It was built during the reign of King Udayadityavarman II.
The temple is small by the standards of the monuments in Cambodia's Angkor area, which was capital of the Khmer Empire, but it follows their basic design. Its central feature is a tower, with two structures known as libraries to the northeast and southeast. A near-square pattern of walls and galleries encloses these structures. There is extensive carving on stone. Beyond the galleries, moats and a laterite wall provide additional enclosure to the complex. A gate structure known as a gopura is found to the east. Beyond it is a baray, or holy reservoir, reached by a paved causeway.
Some historians consider the temple to be most notable for a lengthy inscription that was found at the site and is now in the collection of the national museum in the Thai capital Bangkok. Written both in Sanskrit and Khmer, it dates to 1052 AD. It opens with praise of the Hindu god Shiva and Udayadityavarman II. Further on, the inscription provides a genealogy of preceding Khmer kings and their spiritual advisers. It begins with Jayavarman II, who is generally considered to have founded the Khmer empire in 802 A.D. Religious ritual and the establishment of various settlements are recounted. Gifts provided to temples are listed in detail. The inscription includes the often-quoted claim that Jayavarman II came from Java. Many scholars believe that Java does not refer to the island in Indonesia, but to some other foreign place.
For years following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge government, the area around the temple was the site of a large camp of Cambodian refugees. Anti-communist guerrillas opposed to the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia operated from the camp. Recently, following a program to remove land mines from the area, the Thai government’s Fine Arts Department has begun an extensive restoration of the temple. This is on-going and will take a considerable amount of time.
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