Angkor-Wat, Twelfth-Century Temple Dedicated to Vishnu,The Largest Religious Building in The world,This Image has appeared on Several Successive Cambodia Flags Since 1953.
The last years of eleventh century were ones of turmoil and fragmentation, at different times ,two or even three"Monarch" contented for the title of absolute ruler,at the end of century,however, a new dynasty which was to last for more than a hundred years,began to rule at Angkor,little is know about the first two of its Kings Jayavarman VI and his brother,Dharanindravarman I, but their great nephew,Suryavarman II, under whom Angkor-Wat was built,was like Yasovarman II and Suryavarman I.another unifying monarch,if his inscription are to be believed,he gained power while still young after winning a battle against a rival Prince leaving the ocean of his army on the field of combat,, he bounded to the head of the elephant of the enemy King,and killed [him] as a Garuda on the slope of a mountain might kill a snake"Suryavarman II was the the first King to rule over a unified Cambodian Kingdom since Utyadityavarman II's death in the 1060s,the parallels with Suryavarman I,who was probably no relation,are numerous and instructive ,both Kings came to power following periods of fragmentation and disorder,they responded to this ,once Yasodharapura was in their hands with vigorous administrative policies,with a pragmatic style of Kingship, and by expanding the territory and man power under their control,Suryavarman II campaigned in the East,Against Vietnam and Champa,
using mercenaries drawn primarily from tributary areas to the West,he established diplomatic relations with China- the first Angkorean-King to do so,like Suryavarman I ,he also sought to separate himself in religious terms from his immediate predecessors, Suryavarman I had done this by his patronage to Buddhism, whereas his namesake chose to exhibit a devotion unusual for a Cambodian King- to Vishu,in both case,innovative or personal policies went along with a legitimizing cluster of actions,which linked the Kings with pre-Angkorean pilgrimage sites like Wat-Phu. with Hinda gurus associated with previous Kings,and with artistic styles extending back into the Reigns of the people they had managed to overthrow.
Suryavarman II's devotion to Vishnu led him to commission the largest.perhaps the most beautiful,
and one of the most mysterious of all the monuments of Angkor- the temple,tomb,and observatory now known Angkor-Wat,the temple was not completed until after his death,about 1150,there is a striking evidence,recently uncovered,that its central statue of Vishnu, long since vanished,was dedicated in July 1131,which was probably Suyavarman's thirty-third birthday- a number with important cosmic significance in Indian religion.
What is so mysterious about the temple? first ,it opens to the West, the only major building at Yasodharapura to do so,in addition,its bas reliefs-more than a mile of them around the outer galleries of the temple are to be followed by moving in a counterclockwise direction starting from the Northwest quarter,now the customary way of reading a bas-relief or of walking around a temple was to keep it all on one's right by moving in a clockwise direction,known by the Sanskrit term Pradaksina,the reverse direction was usually associated with the dead, so was the West,for obvious meteorological reasons,(the word for"West' in modern Khmer also mean "Sink" or"Down" some french scholars argued,therefore,that Angkor-Wat ,unlike the other temples at Angkor,was primarily a tomb.
The arguments raged in learned journals until 1940.when Coedes proposed that Angkor-Wat,like fifteen other Royally sponsored Cambodian monuments,be thought of as a temple and a tomb,he cited stone receptacles ,perhaps sarcophagi,that held part of the "Treasure" of these other temples,as for the unusual orientation of Angkor-Wat.Coedes suggested that this may have been in honor of Vishnu, Suryanvarman's patron-deity,often associated with the West,Angkor-Wat is the only temple at Angkor that we know to have been dedicated to him,the twelfth century in fact,saw a vigorous revival of Vaisnavism,associated with popular religion,on the Indian subcontinent,this revival,it seems like early ones in Indian religion,had repercussions at Angkor.
Between 1940 and 1970s little scholarly work was done on Angkor-Wat,scholars and tourists were content to marvel at the artistry of its bas-reliefs (many of them concerned with the prowess of Rama)the dedicate and yet overwhelming proportions of the temple,and its continued hold on the imagination of ordinary Cambodians,in the mid-1970s, however,Eleanor Moron began studying the dimension of the temple in detail,convinced that these might contain the key to the way the temple had been encoded by the servants who designed it, after determining that the Cambodia measurement used at Angkor. the Hat was equivalent to approximately 0.4metre(1.3 feet) moron went on to ask how many Hat were involved in significant dimensions of the Temple,such as the distance between the Western entrance (the only one equipped with its own causeway) and the central tower,the distance came to 1728 Hat,and three other components of this axis measured,respectively,1296,867,and439 Hat Moron then argued that these figures correlated to the Four" Ages" or Yuga" of Indian thought, the first of these,the Krita Yura,was a supposedly Golden Age,lasting 1.728,000 years, the next three ages lasted for 1.296.000 ,864,000 and 432.000 years.
respectively,the second earliest,three times longer,and the third earliest,twice as long,the last age is the Kali Yaga, in which we are living today,at the end of this era,it is believed,the universe will be destroyed,to to be rebuilt by Brahma along similar lines ,beginning with another Golden age.
The fact that the length of these four eras correlates exactly with particular distances along the East-West axis អ័ក្ស of Angkor-Wat suggests that the"Code" for the temple is in fact a kind of pun that can be read in terms of time and space,the distance that person entering the temple will traverse coincide with the eras that the visitor is metaphorically living through en route to the statue of Vishnu in the central tower.walking forward and away from the West,which is the direction of death, the visitor moves backward into the time,approaching the moment what the Indians proposed that time began.
In her research,Moron also discovered astronomicalនក្ខត្តុយោគcorrelationsសហសម្ព័ន្ធ for ten of the most frequently recurring at Angkor-Wat,astronomers working with her found that the sitting of temple was related to the fact that its western gate aligned at sunrise with a small hill to the Northwest,Phnom-Bok moreover,at the summer solstice"and observer..standing just in front of the Western entrance can see the sunrise directly over the central tower of Angkor-Wat,"this day June 21 marked the beginning of the solar year for Indian astronomers and was sacred to a King whose name,Suryavarman, mean protected by the sun and who was a devotee of Vishnu.
The close fit of these spatial relationships to notions of cosmic time, and the extraordinary accuracy and symmetry of all the measurements at Angkor,combine to confirm the notion that the temple was was in fact a coded religious text that could be read by experts moving along its walkways from one dimensions to the next,the learned Pandits who determined the dimensions of Angkor Wat would have been Aware of and would have reveled in its multiplicity of meanings to those lower down in the society,perhaps,fewer and fewer meanings would be clear we cam assume,however,that even the poorest slaves were astounded to see this enormous temple,probably with gilded towers rising 60 metre(200 feet) above the ground and above the thatched huts of the people who had built it.
Two implications of Moron's research are that other temples at Angkor might well be studied and decoded and that this decoding can provide insights into religious and astronomical texts that have disapeared but on which the architecture of temples was based.
Although Suryavarman II probably led a campaign against Vietnam as late as 1150, the date of his date is unknown,in fact,the the period 1145-1180 produced almost no inscriptions and its history must be recreated from later source,Suryavarman's successor,perhaps a cousin reached the throne under mysterious circumstances,probably in a cop d'etat.this new King.Dharanindravarman II,appear to have been a fervent Buddhist,although there is impossibility that he never Reigned as King at Yasodharvarman,around 1160 he was succeeded by Yasovarman II who Reign is recalled in one of Jayavarman VII's inscriptions,there Yasovarman is given credit for putting down a mysterious revolt in the Northwest,The people who led this revolt,according to the inscription,were neither foreigners nor members of the elite,in bas-reliefs at the temple of Ban tiey Chhmar, they are depictedបរិយាយ as people with animal head, perhaps the revolt,like the communist rebellion ការប្រឆាំង in the 1970s,
was a supposedly unthinkable one,organized by the downtrodden segment of the society and by " Forest People" against and allegedly unassailable elite.
Instability continued in the 1160s,Yasovarman was assassinatedធ្វើឃាតកម្ម by one of his subordinates មនុស្សក្រោមបង្គាប់,who then declared himself to be the King,at this time also the tributary state of Louvo sent tributary mission to China, suggesting at least partial independence from Angkor,the absence of inscriptions and the questionable legitimacy of rulers reinforce the impression of rapid change.
Perhaps,as B,P Groslier has suggested,the hydraulicជលគតិវិជ្ជាorganization of the Kingdom had already begun to falter during the Reign of Suyavarman II's,this system of reservoirs and canals,which guaranteed one harvest a year in dry times and two with adequate rainfall,was the basis of Angkor's rice-oriented agricultural economy and allowed the concentration of large populations in this area. Groslier has suggested that the system reached peak efficiency in the mid-eleventh century as the hydraulic components of Angkor-Wat hundred years later were much smaller than those around earlier Temple mountain,indeed, Groslier goes on under Suyavarman II for the first time in Cambodian history,hydraulically based Cities were built at considerable distance from Angkor-at Boeng Mealea and Kompong Svay, perhaps this was done because the water resources in the Angkor region,which had lasted so long, had now been tapped to the limit,water came from a network of small streams,running south from the hills to the North along the slight slop that extended to the shores of the Ton-Le sap, as demands for water increased,these stream were diverted closer and closer to their source,this process reduced the nutrients that the stream brought to fertilize the Angkorean-plain.
Because the slops of the plain is so slight,in dry periods the canals would probably have been nearly stagnant,especially if unstable political conditions warfare,or epidemics had drawn off the labor normally used to maintain them,Grolier has suggested as other scholars have done,that this in ceasing stagnation may well have coincided with the appearance of malaria on the Southeast Asian mainland,accelerating the process,here as so often,we lack generalized statements about conditions at Angkor or any overall statistics that might tell us about the size and composition of the population,the condition of the hydraulic network at particular times,and the relationship-or lack of it-between particular Kings and productive agriculture life.
The closed relationship between water management,priesthood, and temple foundations that Characterized Angkor somewhat resembles the social organization of ancient Egypt and is similar also to the Mayacivilization of medieval Guatemala,in all three cases ,grain surpluses (of Wheat,Rice or Maize) the Priest,who served as patrons of temples and advisers to the Kings ,in various ways,all three Culture-like the regime of democratic Kampuchia in the 1970s, were engrossed in what Marx,described as the Asia mode of production ,although,as we have seen,some King at Angkor,like Suryavarman,were more"Asiatic" than others.
The end of Angkor-Wat.
