Cambodian History Writ Large At Angkor Wat

January 25, 2008
By LESLIE HOOK
The Wall Street Journal

SIEM REAP, Cambodia -- This country's most famous temple may be 900 years old, but the message it sets out to convey is timeless: Angkor Wat is all about glory. The temple is one of hundreds built by kings of the Khmer Empire to commemorate themselves and their empire, as well as to worship their gods. But Angkor Wat stands out from the rest -- in artistry, in scale and in popular imagery.

One of the largest religious structures in the world, and the only religious monument to appear on a national flag, Angkor Wat has become synonymous with Cambodia at its most powerful -- when it was the seat of the Khmer Empire, stretching from the South China Sea to the Bay of Bengal. The monumental scale of the temple has the same effect on visitors today as when it was first built. Angkor Wat has but a single approach: a wide stone causeway more than a third of a mile long (that's as long as six football fields end-to-end). The entry walkway crosses a moat 600 feet wide (my guide assures me it used to be filled with crocodiles) and ends at a wall and gates leading into the center of the compound. The central compound covers about 400 acres and once supported a town of about 100,000 people.

With one central tower more than 130 feet high surrounded by four shorter towers, the center of the temple imitates the five peaks of Mount Mehru, the mythical mountain at the center of the Hindu universe. The temple walls (three concentric rectangles that demarcate the progressively higher levels of the temple), garden grounds and moat represent the soil and seas of the earth.

Reaching Mount Mehru is no easy chore: The temple's stone steps are dizzyingly steep -- more like a stone ladder than a staircase -- as a reminder of the effort it takes for humans to get closer to heaven. And, as if to drive home the point, the inner sanctuaries of the central tower were accessible only to the king and a select handful of priests.

When Angkor Wat was built, Cambodia was primarily Hindu and Khmer culture drew much of its inspiration from India. Most of the inscriptions at Angkor are in Sanskrit, and the nymph-like apsaras, or celestial dancers, that grace the walls derive from Hindu mythology. Later, however, the Khmer kings became interested in Buddhism, and Angkor Wat was converted into a Buddhist monastery between the 12th and 15th centuries. The central statue of the innermost sanctuary -- likely a statue of Vishnu -- was removed and a Buddhist image erected in its place. For several centuries, the Khmer empire practiced a syncretic faith that combined Buddhism and Hinduism.

In many ways Angkor Wat is so much larger than life that the details of the temple get overlooked amid the legends that surround it. It's easy to forget that it contains nearly 2,000 feet of the finest Khmer bas reliefs in the world. Its nearly 2,000 celestial apsaras represent the apogee of Cambodia's apsara-carving tradition and provide a detailed account of court dress and female fashions during the period of its creation, the elaborate headdresses, heavy jewelry worn on the arms and neck, and flowing skirts. Traditional Cambodian dance to this day imitates the apsaras' poses and costumes.

One of the most intricate reliefs decorating the walls of the temple's first gallery depicts the Churning of the Sea of Milk, a key event in Hindu cosmology in which the world was created by an epic tug-of-war between gods and demons. Each side pulled on a giant five-headed snake wrapped around Mount Mehru, and the subsequent twisting of the mountain and churning of the seas gave birth to the apsaras that grace the walls of Angkor Wat, as well as an elixir of immortality over which the gods and demons subsequently dueled. In this story, Mount Mehru is not only the center of the universe, but also the birthplace of the known world.

The Khmer empire included modern-day Burma, Thailand and Vietnam -- the largest area ever covered by Cambodia -- and laid the foundations for Cambodian culture and art for centuries to come. In a sign of the temple's importance, the king's palace was most likely on the temple grounds, although nothing of it remains today. About one million men, women and children populated the Angkor area, according to an estimate by French archaeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier, making it the largest settlement in the preindustrial world.

All this manpower was necessary to build the temples, which were painstakingly erected from giant sandstone monoliths hewed out of a quarry more than 37 miles away. Rather than having foundations that sink into the ground, most Angkorean temples are built on huge mounds of earth that give them their pyramid shape, the soil excavated from a moat or from one of the lakes. Some historians theorize that the blitz of building during the Khmer Empire could have been accomplished only through a mandatory labor requirement levied on all citizens, or perhaps even through slavery.

The grandeur that marked the Khmer Empire was not to last, however. The royal city of Angkor was repeatedly sacked by the Thai army during the 14th century, and in 1431 the capital was relocated farther away from Thailand. Angkor Wat itself -- by that time converted to a Buddhist temple -- continued to function, and for centuries it was home to a flourishing monastery that attracted pilgrims from as far away as Japan, even while the former capital city nearby was gradually overtaken by the jungle. Although the Buddhists occupying the temple removed most of the original Hindu art, Angkor Wat's habitation and its continuous maintenance helped the temple remain relatively intact while many other Angkorean temples now lie in ruins.

Even after surviving the removal of its Hindu art, Angkor Wat did not entirely escape the turbulence of Cambodia's recent history. The Western part of Cambodia in which Angkor Wat is located was a Khmer Rouge stronghold through the 1990s (the Khmer Rouge were ousted from the capital city, Phnom Penh, in 1979). Restoration work on the temples took a forced, decades-long hiatus during the wars that wracked Cambodia through the later half of the 20th century. The area was unsafe for tourists until about 10 years ago, when the Khmer Rouge signed a peace treaty that formally ended Cambodia's civil war. There was relatively little physical damage to the temple as a result of the wars, but they did irreparable damage by destroying almost all of the remaining written records pertaining to the Angkorean period. Khmer archaeology scholar Christophe Pottier of the French Research School of the Far East estimates that 95% of the relevant documents have been destroyed in the past three decades, an irreplaceable loss.

In the years since peace has come to Cambodia the opportunities for looting have also increased, and many of the finest sculptures have been spirited out of the country and sold to buyers abroad. Tourism also poses its own set of dangers, with some temples suffering from overexposure to footsteps or curious hands. But despite this -- even as the physical structures of the temples inevitably decay -- Angkor will continue to symbolize something greater than itself. The memory of the Khmer Empire, and with it Cambodia's full potential, is unlikely to fade anytime soon.

Ms. Hook is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Asia.

Angkor Wat: city that lived and died by the environment

ANIMATIONS: TOM CHANDLER, MONASH UNIVERSITY

KATE CHAILLAT
Down To Earth (India)

The famous temple site of Angkor Wat was once much more than that. A new map shows that the magnificent temples were part of a huge urban sprawl, with an extensive rural hinterland. People here created an elaborate system of reservoirs and canals—for irrigation, trade and travel—that began to silt up as the population grew, and perhaps saw failures that resulted in flooding and water shortages. But at its peak, the agglomeration was the largest of its kind in the pre-industrial world, according to a team of archaeologists working at this ancient Cambodian site.

The Greater Angkor Project (GAP), led by a team of Australian, Cambodian and French archaeologists, has used remote sensing satellite imagery by nasa to uncover what lay hidden under vegetation at Angkor Wat. By detecting slight variations in vegetation and ground moisture due to underlying ruins, the satellite images reveal Angkor’s urban sprawl in unprecedented detail. The archaeologist say the map “displays the ancient Cambodian site as an inhabited space: not a scattered collection of discrete temples, but an integrated, interdependent rural and urban residential network, larger than anything discovered in the ancient world so far.” The findings were published in the August 14th issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

After Mouhot

Angkor was the capital of the Khmer Empire, which held sway over modern Cambodia between the 9th and 14th centuries. In 1866, French explorer Henri Mouhot alerted the Western world to the ruins of a temple complex in Angkor. The place had been visited by Europeans before but Mouhot’s posthumously published Travels in Siam, Cambodia and Laos is believed to have been influential in arousing European interest in the site. Scholars following in the Frenchman’s footsteps were so overwhelmed by the artworks and architecture, that they ignored the archaeology. Angkor was believed to be around 40 sq km.

But GAP archaeologists say the city state was actually “stretched for at least 1,000 sq km”. They say that the closest pre-modern equivalent to the Cambodian city state was the Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala, at its peak around 150 sq km.

“There is not a single square kilometre in Angkor that wasn’t intensively modified and engineered,” says Damian Evans, a gap archaeologist. Besides reservoirs and residential clusters, the map reveals 74 new temples and an elaborate grid of walled field systems.

Evans says there has been an ongoing debate about whether the water network of Angkor could have supported intensive rice cultivation. “The elaborate inlets and outlets on all the major reservoirs coupled with distributor canals connected to every single water source in the region suggest water was intensively exploited at Angkor and could well have been used for rice agriculture. The canals were either made of stone or compacted earth and there was a series of very sophisticated water control devices such as spillways—sometimes massive structures built in stone—which have the capacity to provide irrigation for rice,” he writes.

Old theory

GAP findings confirm a theory, first put forward in 1955 by Bernard-Philippe Groslier. The French archaeologist had argued that the ancient irrigation network, which had been ignored by researchers who followed in Mouhot’s footsteps, “was both built and used for irrigation, specifically, to ameliorate variations in agricultural output caused by an unpredictable annual monsoon and to support a huge population of greater than a million people in a constellation of suburbs”.

Evans, however, is not so sure of Angkor’s population. “The GAP study doesn’t provide any direct evidence of an extremely large urban population. Our study is more revealing about the spatial extent of the settlement than about its population,” he says.

Environmental demise?

Population figures aside, the expansion of Angkor is impressive and bears witness to the extent the Khmers were able to alter their environment, ultimately engineering Angkor Wat’s demise. It was earlier believed that the city state was deserted after Thai armies ransacked it.

But the GAP research has a given a different perspective to the city’s fall. Evans explains that the “massive infrastructural network of roads and canals was built to give coherence to the extended settlement area and to provide a means of communication and of transporting vast amounts of people, stone, and other goods across the landscape”. However the system might have been difficult to maintain especially with potential competing interests for water control (temples, domestic an agricultural use).

Groslier had already suggested that over-intensive irrigation and land-use led to the city’s decline. “Excavations conducted during the mapping did reveal a series of ad hoc adaptations, breaches, modifications to the irrigation system suggesting systemic problems in the network could indeed have caused the downfall of the Angkorian state,” Evans notes.

Furthermore, water-intensive rice agriculture required forest clearing and walled fields, which increased risks of runoffs, sedimentation and caused erratic water flows. In fact remote sensing and ground observations have revealed that “the Siem Reap river is now incised 5-8 metres into the Angkorian floodplain, and a major canal in the south of Angkor that postdates the 14th century ad (when the city was abandoned) is entirely filled with cross-bedded sands, indicating rapid movement of large quantities of sediment-laden water.”

But what led to Angkor’s collapse in the 14th century? Evans admits, “We don’t know that at this stage. There is too little data on both population and on climatic variation in this area”.

What the GAP archaeologists do know though is that expansion of the settlement created increasing difficulties for the movement of people, information and goods around the landscape.

GAP’s current goal is to ascertain if Angkorians were able to deal with the environmental consequences of their settlement if their failure to factor in ecological changes lead to their downfall. Evans says that the increased sedimentation in canals due to deforestation caused by rice cultivation cannot be ruled out.

The archaeologist notes that Angkor’s demise is a lot similar to the collapse of many pre-industrial civilisations. “It’s something to bear in mind, considering that many of our contemporary cities are expansive, low-density urban sprawls as Angkor appears to have been,” he says. Controlling the environment helped Angkor become the great political centre it was but also led to it losing that place.

Archaeologists to dig for more clues about demise of ancient Angkor

Wednesday, August 15, 2007
The Associated Press

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: Excavations are planned at Angkor to scour for more clues about ecological problems which led to the demise of Cambodia's great ancient city, an Australian archaeologist said Thursday.

"We have clear evidence now that Angkor was big enough to have caused environmental problems," Damian Evans said.

"But we need finer-grained detail to determine for sure how severe those problems were, and whether or not the local population was able to deal with them or not," said Evans, deputy director of the Greater Angkor Project at the University of Sydney.

His group published its findings in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They reveal that Angkor, during its zenith between the 9th and 14th centuries, was "the world's most extensive preindustrial low-density complex" and far larger than previously thought. It included an elaborate water management network encompassing nearly 1,000 square kilometers (390 square miles).

Research found that the complex was too vast to manage. Extending rice fields to support a population of more than 1 million resulted in serious ecological problems, including deforestation, topsoil degradation and erosion.

The study's conclusions supported a theory in the early 1950s by Bernard-Philippe Groslier, a prominent French archaeologist, that the collapse of Angkor stemmed from over-exploitation of the environment.

The study produced a comprehensive digital mapping database detailing tens of thousands of individual features across nearly 3,000 square kilometers (1,160 square miles).

Previously, there were around 800 known temple sites in the mapped area, Evans said in an e-mail, adding that the number will likely be between 950 and 1,000 once results from the excavations have been verified on the ground.

In a separate statement posted on his group's Web site, he said some of those sites and other delicate traces of great archaeological significance are under serious threat from uncontrolled development in Siem Reap province to meet rising tourist demand.

He said the development is good for Cambodia, but that proper heritage management systems must be in place so that "small local temples sites and so on can be properly excavated and studied by archaeologists before they are destroyed for modern development."

He said he also hoped that the study will give a "stimulus for greater recognition of the need to stop the illicit international trade" in Cambodian antiquities.

The Angkor temples have suffered extensive destruction by nature and pillaging by looters during three decades of warfare and revolution in Cambodia.

The impoverished country is now at peace and the monuments, including the famed Angkor Wat, are the country's main tourist attractions, earning much-needed hard currency.

But in recent years, conservationists have expressed concerns about stress to the monuments from the tourist invasion.

Evans' study is a wake-up call for more vigilance in Cambodia's efforts to conserve its centuries-old heritage, an official of the Apsara Authority, the government agency managing the site, said Wednesday.

The official, Soeung Kong, said what happened to ancient Angkor in the past "appears to be repeating itself now" and thus highlights current challenges in managing and conserving the temples.

"Since we are aware of this, we have to take measures to prevent it from worsening or to minimize the impact as much as possible," he said.

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On the Net:

Greater Angkor Project:
http://acl.arts.usyd.edu.au/angkor/gap/index.php

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
http://www.pnas.org/current.shtml