Ta Maen Temple (Koh Ker)

Located north of the Koh Ker temple group and just north of the ancient road that once led from Beng Mealea to Koh Ker, Prasat Ta Maen, also known as Prasat Ta Men, is quite similar in many ways to the sites known as “Temple d’Etape” so labeled by the French researchers in the 1900s. It is a small site featuring an outer enclosure wall with a single gopura on the east surrounding a single shrine opening to the east possibly with a forebody that is flanked by the remains of two library buildings that open to the west. Prasat Ta Maen differs in that its construction method would appear to be of an earlier era, utilising brick as the main material for the shrine with sandstone construction. It also appears to have never been fully completed, lacking in its final decoration.

Recently, the Preah Vihear National Authority discovered an inscription here that provides a date of the 10th century.

Around 500m to the northeast, right beside the present-day road that leads to Prey Veng village, there are the remains of a laterite structure.

Historical Notes

Pr. Tå Men is 6 km away. approximately to the North-North-West of the N.-W. corner of the Rahal. It is oriented exactly. The set consists of a brick sanctuary, two libraries and a gopura as well, opening a narrow enclosure of laterite with a chaperon in the section of an angular roof with curved sides, without groynes. Everything is broken down and very ruined.

The sanctuary, of ordinary square plan, with door and false doors, has its interior filled in by ruins; the true lintel of the door, with dowels, is thus almost buried. It is mitred with the uprights which are moulded.

Outside, the octagonal columns are rough prisms; the lintel is high; the overturned sandstone pilasters are bare.

At the false doors mounted by courses and whose profiled frame assembly is then naturally square, the sandstone panel is half the thickness of the wall. The casements there were deeply smashed, but without indication of the protrusions on the beat. Above the large lintel some fine brick moldings supported the tympanum.

The tower bears on a sandstone base, in spanning, and whose height suggests an invisible basement-terrace.

The N. library, of bricks, has a door to the West, a false door to the East is entirely prepared in sandstone, with the projections. The building is half ruined and the one to the south is in even worse condition.

The gopura E., very ruined, is a flat construction, using the three materials. Its plan seems to be a simple widening of the wall (fig. 20) with a narrow passage barely separating the two opposite gates, as at Bantay Srei 545.2

The monuments are no less numerous to the east of the eastern levee of the Rahal, which may have extended along the length of the city first, then higher still, on the roadway.

L’Art khmer classique. Monuments du quadrant nord-est, Henri Parmentier, 1939

Rodney Charles LHuillier

Living in Asia for over a decade and now residing in beautiful Siem Reap. Rodney Charles L'Huillier has spent over seven years in Cambodia and is the author of Ancient Cambodia (2024) and Essential Siem Reap (2017, 2019). Contact via [email protected] - more..