Angkor Wat: The Cosmic Temple of the Khmer Empire
Angkor Wat — built between approximately 1113 and 1150 CE by the Khmer king Suryavarman II — is the largest religious monument ever constructed, covering an area of approximately 400 acres. It was built as a state temple dedicated to Vishnu and simultaneously as a funerary monument for Suryavarman himself — the king as divine mediator between heaven and earth, his temple the axis mundi of the Khmer universe. Its five towers represent the five peaks of Mount Meru, the cosmic mountain at the center of the Hindu and Buddhist universe; its surrounding moat represents the ocean at the world's edge; its galleries, covered in the most extensive bas-relief program in the history of art, depict the cosmic battles of Hindu mythology and the king's own military victories — the two made equivalent. When the French naturalist Henri Mouhot described Angkor in 1860, he struggled to find an adequate comparison: greater than anything left by Greece or Rome, he wrote, a monument to which nothing...