Stories in Stone

the long version

When French archaeologists first surveyed Angkor Wat and other foliage-shrouded temples in western Cambodia in the mid-1800s, no one could say when they were built, or by whom, or for what purpose. "Stories in Stone" recounts the decades of detective work that cracked the code of inscriptions found at the temples to recover the history of one of the world's great lost civilizations. The book focuses on the most illuminating of the inscriptions, 340 lines carved on a stone monolith at the 11th Century temple Sdok Kok Thom. The author, John Burgess, is a former Washington Post foreign correspondent who first saw Sdok Kok Thom while covering the Cambodian refugee exodus of 1979.