Stories on the walls
The outer gallery of Angkor Wat is lined on the inside with continuous bands of carved relief. Seen together, they make up one of the largest and most coherent narrative carving programmes in the ancient world. Most of the scenes are drawn from Hindu literature, with a few showing the king himself, and they were meant to be viewed while walking the gallery, in a counter-clockwise direction, so that each wall unfolds like a long illustrated scroll.
The reliefs are carved in sandstone. Many were once painted and some were gilded, but only traces of colour remain. Over the centuries, visitors’ touch has polished some of the lower areas, and some panels have also been damaged by water and weathering.
The layout of the galleries
The gallery has eight main sections, two on each side of the outer rectangle, plus corner pavilions. Descriptions differ slightly in detail, but the broad scheme is as follows.
- West gallery: two epic battles, the Battle of Kurukshetra from the Mahabharata and the Battle of Lanka from the Ramayana.
- South gallery: a historical procession of Suryavarman II’s army, and scenes of heavens and hells.
- East gallery: the Churning of the Sea of Milk, and a scene of Vishnu defeating demons.
- North gallery: Krishna’s battle with the demon Bana, and a battle of gods and demons.
These are the arrangements typically described by specialists. A visitor who walks the gallery will see how the subjects differ in mood, from the order of a royal parade to the chaos of war.
The Churning of the Sea of Milk
The best-known panel shows a Hindu creation myth. Gods (devas) and demons (asuras) cooperated to churn the ocean of milk in order to obtain amrita, the elixir of immortality. They used Mount Mandara as a churning stick and the serpent Vasuki as a rope, pulling in opposite directions. Vishnu appears in the centre of the scene, and in the story he also takes the form of a turtle to support the mountain from beneath. Flying apsaras above the churning refer to the myth’s account of celestial beings arising from the sea.
The scene is also a good example of how Khmer sculptors condensed a story into a single composition. The rows of straining figures give a sense of rhythm, and the lower parts show sea creatures being ground up by the churning. The same myth is the source for the serpent-holding figures along the causeways of Angkor Thom, which is why it occurs so often in Khmer art.
The Ramayana and the Mahabharata
The Battle of Lanka panel illustrates part of the Ramayana, where Rama, helped by an army of monkeys led by Hanuman, fights Ravana, the king of Lanka, to rescue his wife Sita. The Battle of Kurukshetra, on the same gallery, shows the great war from the Mahabharata between two branches of a royal family. These epics were widely known in Southeast Asia, and Khmer inscriptions mention them frequently. The artists did not copy Indian models but adapted the stories with local costume, weapons and styles.
A royal procession
One of the most unusual panels shows the army and court of Suryavarman II. The king sits on a raised seat with many parasols and fans, officers and elephants are arranged by rank, and a group of soldiers is identified by an inscription as Syam, usually taken to mean Siamese or Tai troops, who appear to serve with the Khmer army. The panel is some of the best surviving evidence of how a Khmer state presented itself. Like narrative reliefs elsewhere, such as Assyrian palace reliefs, it combines propaganda with real observation of costume and organisation, though the Khmer image is a religious as well as a political one.
Heaven and hell
Another panel in the south gallery shows souls being judged and then going upward to levels of heaven or downward to levels of hell. The upper registers have palaces and processions, and the lower show punishments, which were evidently meant as warnings. It is one of the few places where Khmer sculpture directly addresses ideas of moral consequence, and it has parallels in other Asian traditions.
The apsaras and devatas
Beyond the galleries, Angkor Wat is covered with individual female figures, called apsaras or devatas. Strictly, the term apsara refers to celestial dancers, while devatas are female deities or attendants who stand in niches and guard the temple. The distinction is not always applied by visitors. Surveys of the temple have counted well over a thousand of these figures, and one commonly cited count is around 1,800, though totals differ with the method.
What makes them striking is their variety. No two are exactly alike, and they differ in headdress, jewellery, hairstyle and pose, with some holding flowers. They provide valuable evidence for dress and ornament in the twelfth century, even if they are idealised. Some have become darker where visitors have touched them over the years, which is one reason visitors are now asked not to.
Late additions
Some panels in the northeastern part of the gallery were left unfinished after Suryavarman II’s reign. They were completed in the sixteenth century, in a style that differs from the older sections. A viewer can compare them with the earlier reliefs. They are a reminder that the temple remained important to Cambodians long after the royal capital left Angkor.
How to read the wall
The reliefs are not simple illustrations but part of the religious experience of the temple. The visitor passes from the worldly (war, kings, the afterlife) to the sacred (the central towers) by moving inward and upward. The effect of the sequence is that the temple teaches in the manner of a book, though one written in images for a society in which many people could not read. Scholars continue to refine the identification of figures and scenes, and some details of the iconography are still debated.