The Dragon's Mirror: The Magic of Angkor Wat VIII
Part 8
Diego Antolini
27/06/2022 09:24:01
THE LOST CITY AND THE INVISIBLE PICTOGRAMS
On April 1858, a young French explorer, Henri Mouhot, sailed from London to the Southeast Asia. He died in Laos in 1861 at the young age of 35, leaving a diary that was published in 1863 in which he described majestic temples buried in the jungle. Mouhot introduced the lost city of Angkor to the world.
Today the fame of Angkor Wat is consolidated as a world heritage and the largest religious complex left on Earth, with an area 4 times larger than that of Vatican City. Angkor Wat attracts 2 million tourists a year (but it is an official estimate from the government of Phnom Penh, in reality the numbers could be higher,) and it is proudly represented on the national flag of Cambodia.
In 1860, Angkor Wat was known only to local monks and villages, and the notion that this great temple was once surrounded by a completely unknown city of nearly a million people was completely unknown.
It took more than a century of excavations and archaeological analyses to reconstruct the history of the city of Angkor, to bring its structure to light, to reveal the streets, the possible position of the buildings, and its connection with the temple. And yet, many questions are still unanswered today.
Then, in 2014, archaeologists announced a series of new discoveries about Angkor and of an older city buried in the jungle.
An international team led by Dr. Damian Evans of the University of Sydney (Australia) has mapped 370 square kilometers of land around Angkor, with details that had never been shown before. A not inconsiderable performance if we take into account the density of the jungle in that area, and the presence of anti-human mines that still abound in Cambodia since the end of the civil war.
The work was completed in less than two weeks, and was made possible by "Lidar", a sophisticated remote sensor technology that is revolutionizing archaeology, especially in the tropics.
Lidar was mounted on a helicopter that repeatedly flew over the area to be mapped, firing a million laser beams every 4 seconds through the dense jungle blanket and recording every slightest variation in the topography of the land.
The ensuing results were incredible.
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Archaeologists were able to admire cities’ silhouettes printed on the
forest ground which had never been documented before: temples, roads and
canals that extended along the entire targeted area.
"...You
have that kind of sudden 'Eureka!' moment, when you load the data on the
screen for the first time and there it is - this ancient city so
evident in before you..."
Evans said. This discovery has
profoundly changed the understanding that existed until then about
Angkor, the largest medieval city on Earth.
At its peak, in the
late 12th Century CE, Angkor was a very active metropolis covering an
area of 1,000 square kilometers (it would have taken another 700 years
before London could reach a similar size.) Angkor was once the capital
of the mighty Khmer Empire which, ruled by warrior-kings dominated the
region for centuries, covering a territory that included today's
Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. However, the origins of
this empire and of the Khmer kings are still shrouded in mystery.
A
few inscriptions suggest that the empire was founded at the beginning
of the Ninth Century CE by a great king, Jayavarman II, and that its
original capital, Mahendraparvata, lied somewhere in the hills of Kulen,
a jungle-covered plateau located northeast of the place where Angkor
would later be built. But no one could know it for sure, until the
coming of Lidar technology.
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The
scanning of the hills with infrared technology revealed ghostly shapes
on the ground beneath the jungle, where once there must have been
temples, roads, dams and artificial lakes. The lost city where (perhaps)
the Khmer dynasty originated has thus been identified.
The element
that left the researchers most dumbfounded was the discovery of an
engineering system of large-scale canals, which could only have come
from the Khmer Empire.
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By the time the kingdom's capital moved
south and settled in Angkor (late 9th Century CE,) Khmer engineers were
already storing and distributing vast quantities of water throughout the
region by means of a complex network of huge canals and water reserves.
Controlling
the monsoons meant providing security in food production, as well as
making the ruling elite immensely wealthy. For the next 3 centuries the
Khmer invested their wealth in making Angkor the largest temple area in
the world.
Preah Kham, a temple built in 1191, for example,
contained something like 60 tons of gold, the total value of which today
would be 3.3 billion dollars.
Yet, despite this enormous wealth,
Angkor's fate was not benevolent: by the time the Angkor temple
construction project was at its peak, the canals’ hydraulic system was
falling apart.
The end of the medieval era saw a sudden and dramatic climate change throughout Southeast Asia.
Samples
of the nodes of the trees in the area show fluctuations in temperature
from conditions of extreme aridity or humidity, and the Lidar map
indicates floods that have greatly damaged the water network that was
essential for the life of the city.
These two events that happened
with dramatic synchronicity threw Angkor into a spiral of progressive
decline from which it could no longer rise.
In the 15th Century
CE, the Khmer kings definitively abandoned the city and moved to the
coast. They built a new city, Phnom Penh, the current capital of
Cambodia.
When Mouhot arrived, Angkor was nothing more than a cluster
of stone temples, many of which were in ruins. The rest, from the
houses to the royal palaces, which were all built of wood, had long
since disappeared: the immense metropolis that once surrounded all the
temples had been completely engulfed by the jungle.
Using NASA
infrared technology aimed at the internal walls of Angkor Wat, it was
then revealed the existence of numerous pictograms invisible to the
naked eye, perhaps left by pilgrims or monks who have visited or
inhabited the temple over the centuries past. Thus elephants, boats, and
other icons came to light for the first time in modern era.
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