The Angkor National Museum in Siem Reap was on our hit-list before we went to the Koh Ker temple complex a couple of days ago. The museum is well worth a visit for a couple of hours as part of any visit to temple town. The artifacts are very good quality though it’s the wealth of information and signage, together with video presentations, that provide a really good overview of the sculptures, the history of Angkor and the temples on Siem Reap’s doorstep. One statue caught my attention as I’d seen pictures of it before, a badly damaged torso of a male divinity, found at Prasat Chrap in Koh Ker and dating from the second quarter of the tenth century. Its backstory is interesting and a few days later we were able to visit the temple from which it was retrieved. In 1952 EFEO’s Jean Boisselier recovered two almost identical headless statues at Prasat Chrap and delivered them to the National Museum in 1954. A head with a third eye denoting Shiva, which he also brought back, was cemented onto one of the torsos in 1980, but during a cleaning-up process in 2002 it was belatedly realised that the head was on the wrong body, which is listed as inventory number Ka.1667 - the torso which is now at the Angkor museum. Within a few months, the head was attached to the correct torso and this exhibit, recognized as Shiva, is now on display in the National Museum’s Koh Ker collection under inventory number Ka.1817. The torso in the Angkor museum is most likely of Shiva, but without a head, arms and legs, his identity cannot be confirmed. His former home, Prasat Chrap, is itself badly damaged, with the three main towers, blackened by time over the centuries and devoid of carvings.https://www.facebook.com/andy.brouwer.71
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