07/05/2025
One of the iconic photographs from the Angkor temples in the 1960s was the headless Bakong Triad of Roluos, known as Umagangapatisvara – the god Shiva with his two consorts, Uma and Ganga. It appeared in every photo-book at the time before it was removed for safekeeping in January 1970 to the Angkor Conservation Depot in Siem Reap, where it remains today. Sculpted in the style of the second-half of the ninth century, excavation and reconstruction work in 1939 discovered the trio on the east causeway of Prasat Bakong, the state temple of King Indravarman I and the first major mountain-temple built in Angkor. The Umagangapatisvara triad are even mentioned in the temple’s foundation stele. Despite that, some scholars have suggested the trio represents the King and his two wives, or the god Vishnu and his consorts, Lakshmi and Bhumidevi, though the stele’s insistence that ‘Umagangapatisvara, having the small of his back caressed by the reaching arms of Uma and of Ganga’ seems to give special credence to the original identification
Here are a series of archive pictures of the trio.
Source: Andy Brouwer
