Angkor Wat

Time travel is not possible in reality but if you look at historical places and objects you can travel back into a time long before electricity, motorized vehicles and smart phones. A time that both looks easier and much harder than now. Buildings, carvings, engineering that seem to have been impossible to build without modern technology. Things that seem impossible to have been created back then, but still stand today. Many questions race through your mind. Why? Who? What? And so many, how, questions that may never be answered. There are a number of places around the world that will take you back in time hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. One of these places is in central Cambodia. Let’s take a trip back in time to Angkor Wat.

Where in the world?

Cambodia is a country in Southeast Asia that is about the size of the state of Utah in the United States. This small country has a diverse landscape that goes from grassy plains with rice paddies to heavily forested jungles full of exotic animals and insects. Asian Elephants, monkeys, cloud leopards and the king cobra live alongside thousands of insect species. It was in the 1840’s that a French explorer and naturalist Henri Mouhot went to Cambodia to catalog the animals and insects of Cambodia. Henri walked out of the jungle into a clearing and saw Angkor Wat. He was not the first European to walk the grounds, but he was the first known modern European to return home to give a detailed account of this incredible temple.

Some time after the year 1110 the Khmer King Suryavarman II built the city of Angkor Wat. This city became very important both religiously and politically and was the capital of the Khmer Empire. The center of the city is the largest religious temple in the world. In fact there is more sandstone in Angkor Wat than in all of the Egyptian Pyramids put together. The builders used more than 6 million blocks and each one weighed one and a half tons. That is about the weight of the average car. With no modern mechanical help the architects were able to design an amazing place.

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Fun Fact

Insects are eaten by a large number of Cambodian people.

Angkor Wat was designed to show that the king, Suryavarman II, was godlike both in life and death. The temple is laid out symmetrically. The central tower is 213 feet tall. During the spring and fall equinox the sun rises directly behind the central tower. This signified the opening of the new year for the Khmer regime, and was a very important date on the calendar for all Cambodians.

It isn’t just the architecture or the placement of the towers that make it an outstanding place. The inner walls of the temple are filled with carvings called Bas-Relief. Bas-Relief means that the carving was done in the stone to give it a 3d look. This type of carving would take thousands of hours by many artists to complete. The carvings show stories from the Hindu religion including the story of how the world began. They also show stories of the king and his rise to power capturing, killing and conquering other people. And all over the grounds are statues of gods, kings and animals.

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