via The Atlantic, 31 January 2021: The author of the article also wrote Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age (Amazon link), and discusses the so-called collapse of Angkor in the light of today’s “collapse” of civilsations.
In recent decades, archaeologists and geologists have reanalyzed the evidence about what happened at Angkor. What they found is the truth behind the lost-city myth: Great cities are rarely snuffed out in an instant, nor do they “collapse.” Instead, they transform.
For centuries, Angkor was the capital of the powerful Khmer empire, which spanned today’s Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, and parts of China. The empire’s boundaries grew and shrank dramatically from the 800s to the 1600s, and Angkor’s residents changed as successive waves of immigrants came to settle there after new conquests. At the nexus of two fierce monsoon weather patterns, it wasn’t an easy place to live. But Khmer kings ordered their laborers—many of them enslaved—to build enormous reservoirs and canals to prevent Angkor from flooding in the rainy season and desiccating in the dry one. Angkor was a marvel of hydrological engineering, and renowned across Asia for its beautiful architecture.
Then, according to what became the dominant story, Angkor fell abruptly in 1431 after it was sacked by the neighboring Ayutthaya kingdom, in today’s Thailand. Many historical accounts represent this date as a hard end to the great city, giving the misimpression that hundreds of thousands of people dropped everything and fled by 1432, leaving the temples to be consumed by trees.
Source: The Seductive Appeal of Urban Catastrophe – The Atlantic
