Angkor Wat Site Plan and Features

The five towers

Angkor Wat's silhouette is defined by five sandstone towers -- four smaller ones at the corners of the temple's uppermost level surrounding a taller central tower -- built to represent the five peaks of Mount Meru, the mountain at the center of the universe in Hindu cosmology. Each tower is carved with lotus-bud-shaped detailing, and the arrangement is echoed in miniature throughout the temple's design.

Bas-reliefs

The temple's sandstone walls carry nearly 20,000 square feet of bas-relief carvings, among the most extensive in the world. Long galleries depict scenes from Hindu epics -- the Ramayana and the Mahabharata -- alongside historical battles and processions from the Khmer empire. Elsewhere, thousands of carved apsaras, celestial dancers, decorate the walls and columns, each one individually detailed.

The moat and layout

A wide, rectangular moat surrounds the entire complex, representing the cosmic ocean that encircles Mount Meru in Hindu belief. Inside it, the temple is laid out in concentric rectangular galleries, each level slightly smaller and higher than the last, so that a visitor walking toward the central towers is, symbolically, climbing toward the center of the universe.