According to Graham Hancock, Angkor Wat and all the temples were conceived by its builders as a symbolic diagram of the universe. The notion of a land that is the image of heaven on which are built cosmic temples with halls that resemble the sky was an idea that took root in Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat consists of a series of five inter nested rectangular enclosures. The short dimensions are aligned with high precision to true north-south, showing no deviation whatever according to modern surveys. The long dimensions are oriented, equally precisely, to an axis that has been deliberately diverted 0.75 degrees south of east and north of west.
The first and outermost of the five rectangles that we find ourselves looking down on from the air is the moat. Measured along its outer edge it runs 1300 meters north to south and 1500 meters from east to west.
Its ditch, (moat) 190 meters wide, has walls made from closely fitted blocks of red sandstone set out with such precision that the accumulated surveying error around the entire 5.6 kilometers of the perimeter amounts to barely a centimeter.
Angkor Wats principal entrance is on the west side where a megalithic causeway 347 meters long and 9.4 meters wide bears due east across the moat and then passes under a massive gate let into the walls of the second of the five rectangles. This second enclosure measures 1025 x 800 meters. The causeway continues eastward through it, past lawns and subsidiary structure and a large reflecting pool, until it rises on to a cruciform terrace leading into the lowest gallery of the temple itself. This is the third of the five inter nested rectangles visible from the air and precision engineering and surveying are again in evidence with the northern and southern walls, for example, being of identical lengths, exactly 202.14 meters.
Ascending to the fourth rectangle, the fourth level of Angkor Wats gigantic central pyramid, the same precision can be observed. The northern and southern walls measure respectively 114.24 and 114.22 meters. At the fifth and last enclosure, the top level of the pyramid which reaches a height of 65 meters above the entrance causeway the northern wall is 47.75 meters in length and the southern wall 47.79 meters.
According to a study published in the journal Science, these minute differences, less than 0.01 percent, demonstrates an astounding degree of accuracy on the part of the ancient builders.
The Draco-Angkor correlation
The principal monuments of Angkor model the sinuous coils of the northern constellation of Draco. There seems to be no doubt that a correlation exists: the correspondence between the principal stars of Draco and at least fifteen of the main pyramid-temples of Angkor are too close to be called anything else.
Cycles of the Ages
A detailed survey of Angkor Wat published in Science magazine in July 1976 reveled that even the causeway incorporates cosmic symbolism and numbers encoding the cycles of time.
After establishing the basic unit of measure used in Angkor as the Khme hat (equivalent to 0.43434 meters) the authors of the survey go on to demonstrate that axial lengths along the causeway appear to have been adjusted to symbolize or represent the great world ages of Hindu cosmology:
These periods begin with the Krita Yuga or golden age of man and proceed through the Treta Yuga, Dvarpara Yuga and Kali Yuga, the last being the most decadent age of man. Their respective durations are 1,728,000 years; 1,296,000 years; 864,000 years; and 432,000 years.
It therefore cannot be an accident that key sections of the causeway have axial lengths that approximate extremely closely to 1,728 hat, 1,296 hat, 864 hat, and 432 hat the yuga lengths scaled down by 1000. We propose, conclude the authors, that the passage of time is numerically expressed by the lengths corresponding to yugas along the west-east axis.




Angkor wats dominant feature is its long and massive east-west axis which locks it uncompromisingly to sunrise and sunset on the equinoxes. In addition, the temple is cleverly anchored to ground and sky by markers for other key astronomical moments of the year. For example, reports Science:
It is interesting to note that there are two solstitial alignments from the western entrance gate of Angkor Wat. These two alignments (added to the equinoctial alignment already established) mean that the entire solar year was divided into four major sections by alignments from just inside the entrance of Angkor Wat. From this western vantage point the sun rises over Phnom Bok (17.4 kilometers to the north-east) on the day of the summer solsticeThe western entrance gate of the temple also has a winter solstice alignment with the temple of Prast Kuk Bangro, 5.5 kilometres of the south-east.