Construction Begins on Angkor Wat
The largest religious monument on Earth rises as a mausoleum-temple to Vishnu
Quick facts
- Patron king
- Suryavarman II
- Construction start
- c. 1122 CE
- Area
- 162.6 hectares (420 acres)
- Central tower height
- 65 meters (213 feet)
- Dedication
- The Hindu god Vishnu
What happened
Around 1122, Suryavarman II began construction of Angkor Wat, a temple complex covering 162.6 hectares dedicated to his personal protector-god Vishnu. World History Encyclopedia's timeline dates the start of building to 1122; the temple used an estimated 1.5 million cubic meters of sand and silt in its foundations, with sandstone blocks quarried from the Kulen Hills 18 miles away and floated to the site along a purpose-built canal network. Its central tower rises 65 meters, and a moat 200 meters wide and roughly 5 kilometers around encircles the whole complex. Unusually among Angkorian temples, which typically face east, Angkor Wat faces west, the direction traditionally associated with the dead, and its bas-relief carvings are arranged to be read counterclockwise, the reverse of normal Khmer funerary practice, which has fueled a long scholarly debate over whether it was designed from the start as Suryavarman II's tomb.
Why it matters
Angkor Wat is the single structure most people associate with the Khmer Empire and remains the largest religious monument standing anywhere in the world, still a working Buddhist site and a national symbol on Cambodia's flag today. Its west-facing, counterclockwise design is also the strongest physical clue historians have for how Khmer kings understood death and divinity, even though no one has found Suryavarman II's actual burial to settle the funerary-temple question definitively.
How we know
The construction date and material sourcing come from a combination of temple inscriptions, art-historical analysis of the carving style, and geological sourcing of the sandstone to the Kulen Hills quarries. Whether it functioned as a funerary temple remains, in the Encyclopedia's own account, an open interpretive question rather than a settled fact.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Khmer Empire Timeline · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- World History Encyclopedia. Angkor Wat · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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