Angkor Wat - Antike Hydraulische Stadt mit Moderner Technologie

The Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia is possibly the most amazing ancient city in the world. It stretches over an area of more than 400 hectares and consists of about 10 million stone blocks, which are artfully carved and stacked into temples, terraces and galleries. For comparison, Angkor Wat stretches over three times the area of the Vatican City and consists of more than four times as many blocks as the Great Pyramid of Gizeh. No wonder the famous lotus-shaped towers of Angkor Wat adorn the Cambodian flag. But for most of the second half of the 20th century, the city's exploration was limited or completely prevented by those who wanted to uncover the many secrets through ongoing conflicts and civil wars in the country. In fact, the large-scale research on this site was only resumed in the 21st century. But when this happened, a secret began to come to light that was much larger than anyone could have imagined. In 1860, a French explorer named Henri Mouhot traveled through the unknown interior of Cambodia, collected samples and drew observations of a place that was almost completely unknown to the West at that time. One day, Mouhot noticed a rare butterfly fluttering in the air. He began to chase it, but did not notice in his excitement that his pursuit led him deeper and deeper into the jungle, away from his travel group. Shortly thereafter, Mouhot was lost. In panic, he began to chop through branches and overgrown leaves with a machete, desperate to find his way back to his group. Suddenly the jungle opened before him and gave the view of a clearing. And in front of Mouhot stood the most amazing thing he had ever seen in his life. A huge building made of stone that stretched in all directions and reached up to the sky. A huge complex overgrown with jungle. Abandoned for who knows how long. In front of him stood the long-lost Angkor Wat. Today the story of a lonely explorer is told, who happens to stumble across the great ruins of Angkor Wat. A kind of Indian Jones-like figure, who discovers a long-lost secret in the jungle. Of course, this story is strictly not true. Although Mouhot visited Angkor Wat in 1860, the city was not long lost. Although it had been abandoned for centuries, it was known to the local population and was still occasionally used by fishermen, farmers and monks. In fact, Mouhot was not even the first European to see the city. In 1589, almost three centuries before Mouhot's visit, a Portuguese monk named Antonio da Madalena took him on his trip to Angkor Wat in Cambodia and wrote a famous report with the title Angkor Wat is of such extraordinary construction that it is impossible to describe it with words. Especially since it is like no other building in the world. It has towers and decorations and all the raffines that the human genius can imagine. Although this report did not gain much popularity in Europe at the time, Mouhot came across it centuries later, exactly when he was inspired by emerging European reports about explorations in Southeast Asia, a mysterious region that was known to Europeans until then as Beyond India. In fact, Mouhot was so inspired that he decided to leave his comfortable life and board a ship to the other end of the world. On April 27, 1858, the 31-year-old Mouhot sailed from London to Bangkok, where he would start an expedition into the remote inner regions of Southeast Asian mainland. For three years he explored areas that were unknown to Europeans, traveled by local tour guides on fishing boats, on horses, ox carts or even elephants, and often walked through the jungle, where he slept every night in a hammock between two trees. In doing so, he drew meticulous notes and observations of everything he encountered, the places, people, animals and plants. In 1860, Mouhot was finally brought to Angkor Wat by his tour guides. No, it was no coincidence that he arrived there. He did not chase a butterfly through the jungle and the place was not long lost. However, this did not surprise Mouhot. In his notes, he wrote about the moment when he saw the complex for the first time. Angkor Wat presents itself to the eye of the traveler, lets him forget all the hardships of the journey and fills him with admiration and joy, as if one were to find a green oasis in the sand desert. Suddenly, and as if by magic, one seems to be moved from barbary to civilization, from the deepest darkness to the light. He wrote about the central temple with its lotus-shaped towers. One of these temples, a rival of the temple of Salomon, built by Michelangelo, could take an honorable place next to our most beautiful buildings. It is greater than everything that Greece or Rome have left us. When he began to explore the cities, he was amazed at the craftsmanship and wrote, what impresses the viewer with no less admiration than the richness, regularity and beauty of these majestic buildings, is the immense size and amazing number of stone blocks from which they are built. Which means of transport, what a large number of workers, must have been necessary for this? The stones are so perfectly put together everywhere that you can hardly see where the connections are. There are neither signs of mortar nor the traces of a chisel. The surface was as polished as marble. But who, asked Moho, had built this incredible complex? His curiosity was expressed in his notes. Was this incomparable building the work of a single genius, who had the idea and supervised its execution? One is tempted to believe this, because none of it is lacking, inaccurate or inconsistent. Which epoch owes its origin? As already mentioned, neither tradition nor inscriptions provide safe information on this point. Over the months, Moho created detailed records of the cities, which no European, not even Maddalena, had done before, and in writings and drawings, he recorded the foundation and the architectural features. From the terraces and dams to the porticoes and galleries, the incredible carvings that cover the entire site. Although he died of a fever on a trip in 1861, Moho's incredibly complex recordings of Angkor Wat inspired archaeologists from all over Europe and the whole world to travel to Cambodia and explore the mysterious city itself. Although he did not discover it, as popular history says, Moho's work in Angkor Wat stimulated the general research of the cities. And from the beginning, what this research promoted to this day was amazing. When archaeologists floated to Angkor Wat in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it quickly became clear to them that this was nothing less than the largest religious complex in the world. Angkor Wat was much more than just its groundbreaking lotus-shaped towers, which stretched about 60 meters over the surrounding landscape. Angkor Wat was a whole complex with an area of more than 162,000 hectares, as large as 300 American football fields, and surrounded by a water trench, which stretches over almost 1,600 meters by 1,200 meters. Inside this complex there were numerous smaller temples, massive pillars and statues, next to the cross-shaped terraces and the galleries that were connected to each other, all covered with incredible stone carvings, depicting scenes from Hindu mythology, the conquests of a kingdom and nature. In total, the complex was built from about 10 million individual stone blocks, each weighing up to 1.5 tons, which were brought to the construction site from a quarry located about 40 kilometers northeast. The more researchers searched, the more incredible details they found, including a surprisingly advanced architectural understanding, which made Angkor Wat last for centuries. The massive water trench was not only a barrier to the protection of the complex, but an architectural feature that was specifically designed to reduce the pressure that pushed the enormous stone collection outwards. Without this water trench, Angkor Wat would have collapsed many years ago. In addition, the ground in the jungle region where Angkor Wat was built swells and shrinks every year during the flooding and drought periods. To counteract this, the builders of Angkor Wat converted water to change the groundwater level and the composition of the earth under the complex and to prevent it from sinking under its own weight, so that it effectively floats on a changing foundation and remains standing for centuries. While researchers discovered the incredible properties of Angkor Wat, they also worked to construct its history. With the help of carbon dating, archaeological analysis and an overview of the rarely preserved historical documents of the region, they pointed to the Khmer Empire, which emerged in Cambodia in the 9th century AD and developed into the most powerful empire in the region over the centuries. As a result, Angkor Wat was built between 1113 and 1150 AD by the Khmer king Suryavarman II as a Hindu temple for Vishnu. From this point on, Angkor Wat served the Khmer as a physical and spiritual capital, the heart of a powerful empire, until it gradually fell apart for various reasons and the place was abandoned, so that Angkor Wat was slowly swallowed up by the jungle, until the visit of Henri Moreau to the world's archaeologists at his door. When this official explanation was put together, many expressed skepticism. Some also asked how the Khmer could build Angkor Wat in just 37 years, as researchers suspected, without the help of modern technology, while Europe's great powers needed centuries to build their famous cathedrals. One estimate came to the conclusion that the Khmer, if they had worked every day from sunrise to sunset for 37 years, uninterruptedly, every minute, would have had to remove a ton of stone, transport it, cut it and place it to complete the work. For many, this seemed clearly impossible. At other places, others asked, if Angkor Wat was built by a great empire, which stretched for thousands of kilometers, and after its construction, retained its power for centuries, why was it so unique in terms of design and size in the region? If the Khmer Empire had built Angkor Wat, wouldn't they have copied its design elsewhere in their huge empire? But in Cambodia and the neighboring countries, no other building looks nearly as good as Angkor Wat. In addition, there is nothing in the region that exceeds the size of Angkor Wat. Wouldn't future Khmer rulers, after Suryavarman II, have built larger and larger complexes to establish their own power? In the middle of the 20th century, mainstream science had declared the case. Angkor Wat was a magnificent temple complex, built by the Khmer Empire in the course of 37 years, i.e. for about 900 years. But for others, the riddle had just begun. Only in the 21st century, more than 150 years after Henri Moreau had aroused great interest in Angkor Wat for the first time, were the true depths of this mystery finally revealed. Since the official explanation of the Khmer Empire and Angkor Wat, however, researchers have tried to learn more about the empire and the civilization supported by it. But for decades they made little progress. The problem was that the area around Angkor Wat was remote and covered by dense jungle, which made archaeological work on site almost impossible. In addition, the historical records of the region are practically non-existent, due to centuries-long conflicts that destroyed the archives and a hot, humid tropical climate that has long destroyed the palm leaves on which records were written. But that changed in 2012, thanks to archaeologists Damien Evans and Roland Fletcher. This year, the two men led a project in which a kind of advanced, air-supported scanning method called Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR scanning, was used to see around Angkor Wat through the jungle. For weeks, teams flew helicopters over hundreds of kilometers around the complex every day and used LiDAR to fire millions of laser pulses at the jungle below. Sensors in the helicopter then recorded the reflections of the lasers from the jungle floor and made it possible for researchers to map the unique features of the area. What they found shocked them and put the archaeological world in turmoil. Angkor Wat was originally not in the middle of the jungle as it is today, but in the middle of a huge urban area with a low population density. There, hidden under the jungle, were the remains of a huge network of streets, residential areas and shrines, canals and dried out ponds, as well as thousands of rice fields surrounded by low, narrow banks. The network stretched over more than 1,554 square kilometers and made the urban area, in the words of National Geographic, as big as today's Los Angeles, no less than the largest settlement ever built in the history of mankind before the Industrial Revolution. Researchers came to the conclusion that in this area a population of almost one million people had lived. This was an amazing find, a breathtaking metropolis that went far beyond anything anyone could have imagined that existed in the area. Damien Evans claimed that the research had delivered long-lived data in just a few weeks, but with the continuation of the Leida research, the details about this lost metropolis became even more amazing. In the 1950s and 1960s, a French archaeologist named Bernard-Philippe Groslier tried to reconstruct the old water system from canals that surrounded Angkor Wat and fed its huge water ditches with the help of aerial archaeology. His work revealed a system of such complexity that Groslier called Angkor Wat the Hydraulic City. But only when Evans and Fletcher appeared in 2012 did the overwhelming extent of this water system become clear. With the help of Leida, they mapped the water system in the entire city area of Angkor Wat. Incredibly, the researchers mapped extended hydrological systems that stored and distributed the water from three separate rivers and a nearby lake in the entire city area. It was a system of unimaginable size and capacity. Rivers and streams were excavated and straightened to canals with a length of more than 16 kilometers and a width of 40 to 60 meters. While a huge dike system, which stretched for hundreds of kilometers, redirected the water where it was needed. Huge reservoirs called Barais, of which the largest was 8 kilometers long, were used for water storage and a huge network of walled fields was laid for the overflowing rice cultivation. With this water system, a landscape of falling rice terraces was created with independent water supply, which protected the city area from drought. But it was more than that. The water system was clearly intended for this purpose. A transport system in the entire city area as well as a domestic water supply for the drainage. In addition, the water system included numerous ponds and canals filled with fish, another source of food for the population within the city. In fact, Angkor Wat was an advanced, ancient hydraulic city, which went far beyond what Groslie had originally imagined. A water system that is unique on earth. And yet even that was not the most amazing discovery that researchers have made about Angkor Wat. While researchers like Evans and Fletcher investigated the region around Angkor Wat in more detail and revealed the secrets of a huge urban area, others were also looking for secrets within the Angkor Wat complex itself. While this was happening, insights came to light that showed that Angkor Wat was built with frighteningly detailed astronomical and cosmological considerations. First of all, the entire temple complex was constructed in such a way that it represents the universe in Hindu cosmology. At the center of this universe is the cosmic mountain Meru, which is represented by the central and highest lotus-shaped tower of Angkor Wat. The surrounding wall around the main temple represented the mountains on the edge of the world, while the water trench represented the cosmic sea in which life began. In this way, anyone who enters Angkor Wat would go through a earthly version of the holy progress to enlightenment in Hindu mythology, from the crossing of the cosmic sea, the starting point of the journey to enlightenment, to the obstacles that one eventually has to overcome in the holy mountains, to the mountain Meru and to the attainment of enlightenment. It is an amazing thing to create the sky on earth out of millions of tons of stone. But it was not only the Hindu cosmology that found the entrance to the construction of Angkor Wat. There were also a number of advanced astronomical details. Visitors realized that if they stood at the entrance of the complex, the sun would rise perfectly above the central lotus-shaped tower. But in fact, it went much further. The perhaps most famous work of art in the entire Angkor Wat complex is a huge 50-meter-long sculpture, which depicts the Hindu history of the stirring milk ocean from the Mahabharata. In the carving, 88 gods and 91 demons can be seen, all of them large enough to pull on a rope that is attached to a central pivot point, where Vishnu sits in the middle. For itself, it is an amazing work of art. But archaeologists like Eléonore Manica have proven that the carving and its location within the complex were not a coincidence. Much more, the carving served as a kind of huge calendar that counted the days between winter and summer solstice. The spinning pivot point in the middle of the carving, on which Vishnu sits, represents the spring solstice. While 91 demons on one side represent the 91 days from equinox to winter solstice, and the 88 gods on the other side represent the 88 days from equinox to summer solstice. While the sun wandered over it, the carving effectively counted the days of the year. Similar to Hinduism, the builders of Angkor Wat also included references to the movements of the sun and the moon directly in the dimensions of the complex. Consider that the top elevation of the central tower has axial outer dimensions of 189 ellen east-west and 176.37 ellen north-south. If you add these two numbers, you get 365.37, almost the exact length of a solar year. In addition, the central tower of Angkor Wat has nine inner chambers with a total dimension of 27 ellen north-south and 28 ellen east-west. Why is this important? The orbit of the moon takes 27 days and at this time it seems to move through 27 consecutive regions of the sky. In Hinduism, these regions are called moon villas and depending on the context, they can be either 27 or 28. In other words, while the top of the central tower reflects the orbit of the sun, the chambers below it reflect the orbit of the moon. To put it simply, the entire Angkor Wat complex was built between cosmological and astronomical implications as an expression of the greater heavenly order. While many ancient cities have similar features, so few can be seen in one place with such details. Was the Khmer Empire really so far ahead of what historians thought possible? There is one more thing. One last detail about the layout of Angkor Wat that needs to be mentioned. It has been shown that all buildings in the Angkor Wat complex are perfectly aligned to the four celestial directions of the compass with a GPS precision level. If Angkor Wat was built about 900 years ago by the Khmer Empire, how could that have been possible? No compass that existed at that time could provide such precision. Take a step back and look at everything we have discussed about Angkor Wat so far. The amazing level of construction made of millions of stones, the advanced water system that surrounds the largest pre-industrial urban area on Earth, the detailed astronomical and cosmological precision in design and layout. It is clear that Angkor Wat is one of the most amazing places on Earth. In fact, however, things are not only amazing when you step back, but also when you step closer. Since it first came to public awareness in the 1860s, it is one of the things that people have always been most amazed at about Angkor Wat. It is its carvings. You can see them everywhere. On walls and pillars, doors and ceilings, even on the outside of the building. Although Angkor Wat is the largest temple in the world, every centimeter of it is covered with carvings, even in places that no one will see. Some of these carvings are huge, like the stirring of the Milky Way, while others are often so small that you can hardly see them because of their complicated details. There are more carvings in the entire complex than a person could ever examine in his life. But as different people slowly began to take a closer look at these carvings, they noticed some that were extremely bizarre. One of these people is the independent researcher and well-known YouTuber Praveen Mohan, who in his research in Angkor Wat in 2021, where he personally examined every centimeter of the temple, discovered more than one inexplicable carving. As expected, he found that there were carvings everywhere, even outside the temple, in places where people would not even see carvings. But there was something even more amazing. First, there was this carving for the sun god Surya, the personification of the sun in Hinduism. Below Surya are nine figures in the carving, which represent the nine planets of our solar system, including Pluto and its orbit around the sun. It is a beautiful work of art. There is only one problem. Pluto was officially discovered only in 1930 and cannot be seen without a powerful telescope. In fact, Neptune, the eighth planet in our solar system, was only discovered in the 1840s, while the seventh planet, Uranus, was only discovered in 1781, many centuries after the alleged construction of Angkor Wat. How did the builders of Angkor Wat know that nine planets orbit the sun? Mohan suspected that another carving could provide an answer, namely one that shows an incredible scene around the god Indra and a three-headed elephant named Airavata. At the lower edge of this carving is a man to be seen, who seems to be watching the scene through a telescope. He stands with a cylindrical device on one eye and pushes his nose out of shape while the other eye is closed. Did the builders of Angkor Wat know that there were nine planets because they saw through a telescope? Note that according to the history books, the telescope was only invented in 1608, almost 500 years after the construction of Angkor Wat. So how could that be possible? But that wasn't all. At another point, Mohan noticed a carving that showed a figure riding on an elephant with four tusks. While some interpreted this as a mythical scene, Mohan and others pointed out that elephants with four tusks actually existed two million years ago. And indeed, fossils of these elephants with four tusks were found in Southeast Asia near Cambodia. Long before fossils were officially discovered? And if so, how? Other researchers noticed something even more bizarre in the temple of Angkor Thom, a smaller temple, just three kilometers from Angkor Wat, which was part of the larger urban area of Angkor. There, a carving seems to depict a Stegosaurus dinosaur, an elephant, an animal that people in the region knew well, missing four tusks is one thing, but a dinosaur is something completely different. How could the builders of Angkor Wat know about such an ancient creature? As more and more inexplicable carvings like these were found, many questions began to arise. Is Angkor Wat really 900 years old, built by the Khmer Empire? And if so, where did they get all this advanced knowledge about buildings and hydraulics, about astronomy, and about long-extinct animals? Is it possible that the Khmer Empire did not build Angkor Wat at all? And if not, who then? Could a civilization before the Khmer Empire actually have been the real builder? And if so, where did they go? And what else did they know? In 1934, a team of archaeologists led research in the main chamber of the central tower of Angkor Wat under the leadership of Jean Comet, when they came across a well that was embedded in the foundation under a large Buddha statue. The statue was not an original building, but was added by generations of Khmer after their kingdom was converted to Buddhism, and it seemed to have been intentionally built to cover the well. But why? Comet and his team slowly began to remove the centuries-old debris that had filled the well, and they found that the well had sunk much deeper into the ground than they had thought. At a depth of 15 meters, they came across an underground groundwater mirror that flooded the shaft, so they pumped water and dug further. They were glad that they had done this, when they finally discovered a broken stone box at a depth of just over 21 meters, which blocked their way with a strange circular section at the top. In this section they found 65 grams of gold leaf. What could that be? the researchers wondered. As strange as it was, Comet and his team did not go any further. Instead, they finished their work and returned to Europe, without noting any further details, while the box itself was mysteriously lost. When questions about the secrets of Angkor Wat arose in the younger past, some returned to take a closer look at Comet's work, to ask questions and to put pieces together. At the top of the central tower of Angkor Wat there is a hole through which the sun shines. Some have suspected that the process in which the sun shines through the hole down the shaft onto the box could have been part of a kind of solar energy device, whereby the sun's rays interact with the mysterious box to generate and store energy. While the theory seemed far-fetched at first, their advocates referred to an old report on Angkor Wat, which was written long before Henri Mouau and which clearly provided evidence of how such a solar energy system could have functioned. In 1296 AD, the Chinese diplomat Su Daguan traveled to Angkor Wat at the peak of the Khmer Empire, where he stayed as a guest of the Khmer king for almost a year. Although he was not the first Chinese to visit the place, he was the first to provide a detailed report on the city and its people. In fact, his groundbreaking work, The Brothels of Cambodia, is the only known written report from this time worldwide. In this report, something incredible is mentioned. As Su wrote, In the center of the capital is a golden tower, flanked by about 20 stone towers and about 100 stone chambers. According to Su, the central lotus bud tower of Angkor Wat was made of gold or covered with it. This struck those who speculated about a solar energy system in ancient Angkor. If a kind of solar energy device was buried in the central tower of Angkor Wat, then there must have been a possibility to access this energy. Gold is one of the most electrically capable materials on earth. If, as Su suspects, the central tower was originally covered with gold, could this have anything to do with the projection of energy? Many brought Angkor Wat here in connection with the work of the famous inventor Nikola Tesla, who developed a device called the Tesla Tower on which a large ball of conductive metal was located at the top and should pump the energy of the earth into the sky, where individual receptors around the world can access it. Is it possible that Angkor Wat did something similar? Theories about an ancient electric Angkor were only further developed in 2015, again thanks to the Leida research of Damien Evans and Roland Fletcher. This year it became known that there were elongated structures under the site of the Angkor Wat complex that formed the shape of a huge spiral, about 1,500 meters long. When the results were put together, Evans and Fletcher were speechless. The huge spiral was different from anything they had ever seen before and they had no idea what it could be. Fletcher called it the most conspicuous discovery in connection with Angkor Wat. While the two men wrote in their report, the huge, unique and problematic structure of the straight spirals had never been recognized before or only predicted or suspected and still draws from every explanation. Take a closer look at these spirals. Don't they look strangely electric? Some already claim that these spirals must have been part of an old energy system and functioned as a kind of power grid for the storage and distribution of energy. If more is known about the spirals in the coming years, could they provide evidence for an ancient electric Angkor? Questions of this kind make many believe that the secret of Angkor Wat could go much further than the mainstream science is currently willing to accept. Even much further than anyone imagined. Was Angkor Wat really built by the Khmer Empire 900 years ago? Or is it possible that it was only discovered and used by the Khmer and that it was actually built long before them by other advanced ancient builders? Consider that Su Daguang, when he visited Angkor Wat in 1296, was told by locals that the temple complex had been built by a divine architect in a single night. His visit was less than 150 years after the alleged construction of Angkor Wat by the same empire that Su visited. If the Khmer had built it, wouldn't they remember it? Wouldn't they want to boast of a foreign builder with their performance? To say that it was built by a divine architect sounds more like the explanation of a people that discovered a fantastic building and needed a story about how it got there. Why should one say that someone else had built it, if it was someone else who built it? Even more important, if it was someone else who built the Khmer, who were they? And did they really know the secrets not only of astronomy and hydraulics, but maybe also of energy generation? Regardless of the answer to these questions, the following is clear. Even according to official explanation, Angkor Wat is one of the most amazing places in the world. It is the heart of a powerful empire and the heart of a progressive urban area that was built by people with amazing building skills and precise astronomical knowledge. But maybe it goes beyond that. Maybe Angkor Wat was not only the home of the Khmer Empire, but also of an ancient advanced civilization that had long been forgotten. You will want to stay up-to-date to find out what may be there. But if you would like to further explore the idea of ​​an advanced ancient civilization, which is older than the mainstream science has recorded and has left incredible buildings, which you are only now beginning to understand, take a look at our video about Nan Madol, the ancient floating city that was built by giants. Thank you for watching. Be sure to subscribe to our channel if you want to see more videos like this and click on the notification bell so you don't miss anything in the future.