This work, known for ages and long held in the Angkor Conservation depository before Cambodia offered it to the United States ambassador, tallied with a headless female body, sent by the French School of the Far East to the Musée Guimet in 1936 and since then shown in that lacunary state.
The two fragments were certainly discovered in the same sanctuary, the vast Bakong temple consecrated by the king Indravarman (r. 877-886 at least) in 881, to honour Shiva in the form of the linga, but in locations very remote one from the other. This female divinity had doubtless originally been placed in one of the brick towers raised at the base of the pyramid, beside one of the eight forms of Shiva that may have been worshipped there.
The particular proportions of the face with its broad features inscribed in a square, the arch of the eyebrows treated in a single unbroken, sharp line, the hair dress framed by an outline level with the temples, the diadem consisting of a wide band adorned with florets in lozenges and triangles, framed with plain moulded edges, and topped with a frieze of florets and stems, appear as so many characteristics of this style in which divine images achieve a hieratic, majestic aspect.
