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No account of Cambojan religion would be complete without some reference to the splendid monuments in which it found expression and which still remain in a great measure intact.  The colonists who established themselves in these regions brought with them the Dravidian taste for great buildings, but either their travels enlarged their artistic powers or they modified the Indian style by assimilating successfully some architectural features found in their new home.  What pre-Indian architecture there may have been among the Khmers we do not know, but the fact that the earliest known monuments are Hindu makes it improbable that stone buildings on a large scale existed before their arrival.  The feature which most clearly distinguishes Cambojan from Indian architecture is its pyramidal structure.  India has stupas and gopurams of pyramidal appearance but still Hindu temples of the normal type, both in the north and south, consist of a number of buildings erected on the same level.  In Camboja on the contrary many buildings, such as Ta-Keo, Ba-phuong and the Phimeanakas, are shrines on the top of pyramids, which consist of three storeys or large steps, ascended by flights of relatively small steps.  In other buildings, notably Angkor Wat, the pyramidal form is obscured by the slight elevation of the storeys compared with their breadth and by the elaboration of the colonnades and other edifices, which they bear.  But still the general plan is that of a series of courts each rising within and above the last and this gradual rise, by which the pilgrim is led, not only through colonnade after colonnade, but up flight after flight of stairs, each leading to something higher but invisible from the base, imparts to Cambojan temples a sublimity and aspiring grandeur which is absent from the mysterious halls of Dravidian shrines.

One might almost suppose that the Cambojan architects had deliberately set themselves to rectify the chief faults of Indian architecture.  One of these is the profusion of external ornament in high relief which by its very multiplicity ceases to produce any effect proportionate to its elaboration, with the result that the general view is disappointing and majestic outlines are wanting.  In Cambojan buildings on the contrary the general effect is not sacrificed to detail:  the artists knew how to make air and space give dignity to their work.  Another peculiar defect of many Dravidian buildings is that they were gradually erected round some ancient and originally humble shrine with the unfortunate result that the outermost courts and gateways are the most magnificent and that progress to the holy of holies is a series of artistic disappointments.  But at Angkor Wat this fault is carefully avoided.  The long paved road which starts from the first gateway isolates the great central mass of buildings without dwarfing it and even in the last court, when one looks up the vast staircases leading to the five towers which crown the pyramid, all that has led up to the central shrine seems, as it should, merely an introduction.