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Angkor
Angkor
Wat
Angkor
Wat is the most famous temple ground in the entire Angkor
plain. It was built by King Suryavarman II in
the middle of the 12th century over a period of about
30 years. Like many other Khmer temples, Angkor
Wat was built as architectural allegory of the Hindu
religion. The central tower stands for Mount Meru,
the center of the universe according to Hindu mythology;
the top of Mount Meru is considered the home of the
gods.
The
temple ground is surrounded by a wall and a moat, not
only for demarcation purposes, but also because in Hindu
mythology Mount Meru is surrounded by other mountain
ranges and oceans.
The
main entryway to Angkor Wat is a street of roughly half
a kilometer length, ornamented with balustrades and
fringed by artificial lakes, so-called Barays. This
entryway resembles the rainbow bridge in Hindu mythology,
the link between heaven and earth, or the realm of the
gods and the realm of the mortals.
Angkor
Wat is in better structural condition than many
other temples on the Angkor plain because it has been
converted into a Buddhist temple probably even
before the Siamese conquest in 1431, and because it
has been used as such continuously after (in the 13th
century Buddhism became an important religion in originally
pure-Hindu Angkor).
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