Of all the monuments built during the Middle Ages, few can equal the great Khmer temple complex of Angkor Wat for sheer scope, mysterious beauty, and eery charm. The surrounding moat alone was a vast engineering feat, 600 feet wide and 2.5 miles long. Inside its walls was an enormous temple complex of towers guarding a central enclosure, an architectural symbol of Hindu beliefs concerning the outer and inner worlds.
Like the Gothic cathedrals in France around the same time, Angkor Wat was a gigantic "sermon in stone," with carvings on virtually every surface showing Hindu gods and other aspects of the Khmer culture and religion. But this was a world utterly foreign to the European mind. For one thing, Angkor Wat was not a place where the common people were invited to enter and worship, as they were at Notre Dame or Chartres; it was set aside purely for the royal house. Furthermore, one can only imagine what a European priest would have made of the many sculptures showing bare-chested beauties. Yet this was an everyday sight in the humid jungles of Southeast Asia, where Khmer women wore wraparound skirts with nothing covering their breasts.
Despite these and other scenes depicting ordinary life—planting and harvesting rice, trading goods such as spices and rhinoceros horns with Chinese merchants— Angkor Wat can justly be described as a spooky place. Its abandonment after the Thai conquest in the mid-1400s added greatly to this quality: in the centuries that followed, this gargantuan temple city was forgotten, its towers choked by vines while its inner courts became home to snakes and other creatures of the jungle. It was only rediscovered in the 1860s—by the French, who then controlled Indochina.
The powerful Hindu kingdom of Ma-japahit (mah-jah-PAH-hit), founded in about 1263, began to extend its influence, taking control of Sumatra as the Srivijayas declined. In 1292, Marco Polo visited the Majapahit kingdom and also noted the existence of a Muslim community on Sumatra.
This was the first proof by an outside observer of the Muslim presence in the region, though in fact Islam had probably arrived two or three centuries earlier. In the two centuries following Marco Polo's visit, Islamic forces would bring down the Majapahits and convert many peoples on neighboring islands. The Balinese, however, remained predominantly Hindu.
World History
