FOR EIGHT CENTURIES serene and seductive celestial dancers have graced the entrance to the temple of AngkorWat, holding promise of the imagined delights of heaven. Throughout the great religious complex atAngkor, thousands of these delicately carved apsaras bearwitness to the glories of the Khmer Empire that ruled much of southeast Asia for six centuries. Time mellowed her lines but left her beauty undiminished. 
In the language of the ancient Khmer, and of the Khmer people of contemporary Kampuchea (Cambodia), Angkor means "the city" or "the capital." Geographically it denotes some 75 square miles of fertile plain between the Kulen Hills and the Tonle Sap Lake. Between the 9th and 13th centuries A. D. a dozen Khmer kings constructed successive capitals at Angkor. These encompassed a sophisticated irrigation system that mastered the vagaries of monsoon rains and drought to grow rice enough, eventually, for a million inhabitants, and multitude of major building complexes of sandstone. The gigantic temple that later became known as Angkor Wat is the largest and artistically most accomplished.