#Angkor Wat
The temple of Angkor Wat is one hundreds of temples that
make up the Angkor world heritage site. Angkor was once the largest city on
earth. Then seemingly overnight, this ancient metropolis of nearly a million
souls vanished…
Today experts are using new technology to solve this great
mystery and restore the treasures of a lost empire.
Damien Evans, aerial archaeologists are on a mission to map the
ruins of the lost civilization below. New technologies are allowing Damien to
trace urban boundaries and landmarks like never before. Lasers mounted on the
helicopter can cut through the jungle to detect topographical details hidden beneath.
For the first time Damien is able to map the full reach of this mega city. The
map shows the area of Angkor was the size of modern day Los Angeles.
Ancient Angkor was the capital city of the mighty Khmer
empire. For six centuries this military superpower conquered and controlled a
vast kingdom in Southeast Asia. Then just as Europe was entering the renaissance.
This thriving 3000 square kilo meter city was swallowed up by the jungle.
Scott Hawkin expertise in decoding the ruins of ancient
cities stone, “We found hundreds and hundreds of additional temples. We found
the remains of canals even a small road from a thousand years ago even if it's
completely overgrown”.
The inhabitants of Angkor left no written records that
indicate an invasion plague or other catastrophic event. So what did go wrong
here?
The number one enemy of this place is water. When water gets
behind it is an exponential process. So it was basically a systematic collapse
of the site. The temples were built by stacking a core of laterite then
encasing it in intricately carved sandstone. These stones are so tightly laid
that even a piece of paper can't stick between them today.
The best way to discover why Angkor vanished is to
understand how it thrived in the first place. Ruin walls around the temple appear
to be part of an ancient canal. A key piece to the puzzle, new aerial imagery
has revealed an ingenious network of canals and reservoirs throughout the city.
Even the river in the modern town is actually an ancient canal still flowing
today as it did a thousand years ago. The centrepiece of the system is an eight
kilometre long two kilometre wide reservoir just outside the city. This
reservoir alone would have taken six thousand workers more than six years to
dig out by hand. Why the ancient Khmer went to such lengths to divert water on
such a massive scale?
Understanding how this system function will help Damien and Scott
reconstruct the rise of the Khmer empire and perhaps uncover the reasons for its
downfall. When the Khmer empire collapsed the temples of Angkor were lost to
the world for over 400 years. By the time French explorers founded in 1860, the
temple had nearly been devoured by the jungle.
Cambodia has only two seasons wet and dry. The key problem
for early civilizations in this area is you have too much water for half the
year and not enough water for the other half of the year. So the secret of
success of civilizations in this area is their ability to develop technological
solutions to that fundamental problem of water supply. The ancient Khmer
designed a system that could store excess rain in the wet season and then
disperse it in the dry season. The key was digging enormous reservoirs. When
the spillway was opened, tremendous water pressure from the reservoir forced
water down a network of canals and into the rice fields below. This is the
reason why the anchor civilization was extremely successful. This engineering
feat would be massive even today. Some 48000 square kilometres of fertile rice
paddies supported a huge urban population and turned ancient Angkor into a
dominant empire. Now the question is why and how did it all fall apart?
Today all that remains are these ruins of a lost age. Angkor
was founded in the 9th century as a representation of Hindu cosmology. Like the
ancient Mayans across the globe, the Khmer calendar was based on the cycles of
the heavens. Now twice a year Taurus can witness a celestial event that the Khmer
kings used to demonstrate their divine right. The alignment of the capstone
focuses an intense beam into the ceremonial chamber.
The kings used their divine power to command thousands of
servants to build the temples and reservoirs that turned Angkor into an ancient
mega city. The Khmer empire's transition to Buddhism in the 13th century was a
fundamental shift. For one the kings were no longer venerated as gods. Building
Hindu temples came to a halt and new evidence suggests they may have stopped maintenance
work on their complex water system as well.
For a water system already in disrepair this mega drought
would have been catastrophic. Ironically the city was doomed by its own
ingenuity. When the system failed during the drought Angkor could not grow enough
rice to sustain itself and the civilization collapsed all that remains of this
mighty empire are ruins. The pressure on the park to protect these monuments is
enormous but the teams of workers and researchers never rest in their fight to
preserve the last legacy of the lost city of Angkor.
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