Parvathi's Head....

[Guest guest]

Pranam. An article I read in another group...

After 500 years, sheer chance reunites head and body of Hindu statue in

Paris By John Lichfield in Paris Published: 19 May 2006

 

A wife of the Hindu god Shiva, decapitated in Cambodia in the 15th century,

finally has her head back, after it was discovered 500 years later on the

other side of the world.

 

A Paris museum dedicated to Asia, the Musée Guimet, is celebrating the

implausible chain of events that reunited a divided masterpiece of

ninth-century Cambodian art.

 

The headless body of a wife of the Hindu god of destruction and renewal was

found by French archaeologists near the shattered temple of Bakong, amid the

celebrated Angkor ruins, in 1935. The statue has been exhibited since 1938

at the Musée Guimet in the Place d'Iéna in Paris, which has the finest

collection of ancient Khmer artefacts outside Cambodia.

 

Last autumn, the museum held an exhibition on Vietnamese art which paid

tribute in its catalogue to a retired American diplomat, John Gunther Dean.

The catalogue recounted Mr Dean's efforts, as ambassador to Cambodia in the

early 1970s, to rescue ancient Khmer art from the ravages of the Khmer

Rouge, which was determined to expunge all record of Cambodia's past.

 

To thank the museum, Mr Dean, now 80, offered a gift from his own collection

of ancient Khmer artefacts. Last month, the gift arrived, the sculpted head

of a woman found at the Bakong temple site in 1939.

 

"I asked him for a Khmer head because we only had headless statues but I

didn't think for a moment about a possible match," said Pierre Baptiste, the

museum's curator for south-east Asian art.

 

"I brought the head into our [Cambodian] hall looking for a place that it

could be exhibited," said M. Baptiste. "I had a sudden notion the two pieces

resembled each other but then thought, 'no, things never happen that way'.

 

"I put the head on the statue's shoulders. It shifted a few millimetres. I

heard the little click that you get when two stones fit together and the

head fell perfectly into place. It was as if it had put itself together. I

still get goose-bumps thinking about it."

 

The reformed statue, which is 4ft 10in high, was beheaded in the temple when

it was destroyed in the 15th century.

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article548119.ece

 

 

 

Let my every word be a prayer to Thee,

Every movement of my hands a ritual gesture to Thee,

Every step I take a circumambulation of Thy image,

Every morsel I eat a rite of sacrifice to Thee,

Every time I lay down a prostration at Thy feet;

Every act of personal pleasure and all else that I do,

Let it all be a form of worshiping Thee."

 

>From Verse 27 of Shri Aadi Shankara's Saundaryalahari

 

 

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.

[Guest guest]

Pranam. Here is the pic..

 

With Love

Shankaree

 

 

 

Let my every word be a prayer to Thee,

Every movement of my hands a ritual gesture to Thee,

Every step I take a circumambulation of Thy image,

Every morsel I eat a rite of sacrifice to Thee,

Every time I lay down a prostration at Thy feet;

Every act of personal pleasure and all else that I do,

Let it all be a form of worshiping Thee."

 

>From Verse 27 of Shri Aadi Shankara's Saundaryalahari

 

 

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.