8 Ancient Civilizations That All Carved the Same Non-Human Face Into Stone

In 1860, French explorer and naturalist Henri Mouhot pushed through the jungle of what is now Siem Reap Province, Cambodia, and encountered something that stopped him entirely. He had been searching for botanical specimens. What he found instead were the temples of Angkor, rising from the forest like a stone city dreamed by a civilisation that no longer existed. Mouhot spent weeks documenting what he saw, filling his field journals, now held at the Royal Geographical Society in London, with meticulous sketches of carvings, towers, and friezes. One face kept appearing. He drew it again and again, and he never found a name for it.