The Bakheng was the first of the giant pyramids at Angkor. It rises in five steps from a square base, each side 76 metres (250 feet) long. A stairway runs up each side of the pyramid, oriented exactly north-south-east-west, symbolic of the order of the world established by the original creation when the mound was fixed. On the flat top of the step pyramid, another square platform supports five towers, the first of the `five-towered sanctuaries' characteristic of the next three centuries of Angkor temple-mountains. In the central tower of the five was the shrine of Shiva, with the linga mentioned in the inscription, though it has now disappeared.












Giant Pyramids at Angkor


Why five towers for the temple-mountain? Because Mount Meru has always been described as the mountain with five peaks. Apart from this clear symbolism, French scholars have traced much more intricate meanings in the design of the Bakheng-and so in the designs of the many Angkor temples derived from it. Around the base of the pyramid and on its steps, other smaller towers can be seen. They totalled 109-the central axis plus four 27-day phases of the moon. The 60 small towers on the steps apparently correspond to the cycle of the planet Jupiter. The 12 towers on each step represent, in Khmer thought, not 12 months of the sun's year but a time cycle of 12 animals. Most extraordinary of all, anyone arriving at one of the entrances, on the cardinal compass points, would see only 33 towers. This careful arrangement was designed by the architect (a skilled profession in Khmer society) to represent the 33 gods who live on Mount Meru.


 


The city built by Yasovarman around the Bakheng hill, now thickly wooded on its slopes below the temple ruins, spread for more than 16 square kilometres (6 square miles)-more than the area of the later city of Angkor Thom, whose territory it overlapped. Apart from the stone temple, few of its structures were built of durable materials and traces of two of its moats have been the chief clues about its size. It is likely that only the central area was completely built up, the rest of the enclosed space is believed to have been rice paddies with scattered hamlets. But Yasovarman's greatest work was the system of water channels, with hundreds of local ponds, which were devised to nourish his city and supplied by the colossal reservoir called the East Baray. To build this reservoir close to the city, his men threw up a rectangular enclosure-surveyed with astonishing exactness-nearly 8 kilometres long by over 1.6 kilometres wide (5 miles by 1 mile), four times the size of the reservoir built by the king's father at Roluos. Thus in 11 years Yasovarman created the framework for what could have remained the Khmer capital throughout the kingdom's existence.

 

It was not to be. The great king's sons were weak monarchs. The small Baksei Chamrong pyramid beside the Bakheng and the Prasat Kravanh, on the eastern side of Angkor, are thought to be their temple-mountains, both dating from the early tenth century. But little else was built and the usurpers that followed took the capital to another site 160 kilometres (100 miles) away on the lakeside. When the throne returned to the old royal family and Angkor became capital again, the wooden buildings had been consumed by the jungle and Rajendravarman lI and his successors occupied a different area centred on the group of buildings that later became the heart of the walled city, Angkor Thom.


A Township of Temples
 

Crystallotus Home | E-zine

Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.