November 30, 2009 • 22 mins
At its height, the city of Angkor was larger than Rhode Island. Replete with ornate architecture, the metropolis also served as a religious center. Yet by the time Europeans discovered the site, it was ruined. What happened? Listen in and learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And if you've
been listening to the podcast, you know how much Katie
and I love a good lost city. We've talked about
(00:22):
Atlantis recently, and a little while before that we talked
about the North Chico in South America. So these cities
that disappear, or empires that appear out of nowhere and
then disappear again seemed to fascinate us. So today we're
going to do the lost city of Anchor. And when
Sarah said this earlier, I was like, oh, you want
(00:43):
to talk about Anchor Watt and she said, no, there's
a lot more to it than that's just one temple, Katie.
So today it's ruins and peasants who grow rice in
northwestern Cambodia. That's what you think of when you're thinking
of Ancre Watt. But back in medieval times it was
something else. It was a very impress us, a very
huge city with a lot of amazing works of engineering.
(01:04):
But what went wrong? Well, to do that, let's start
out with a little bit of background on Anchor, which
starts in a D. Eight hundred and Sarah was saying,
it's lovely to be able to start with one person
instead of the people from this river came and exactly
nice to have one warrior type guy coming into the
picture early on. And in this case it's a powerful
(01:27):
regional king named Jaya Armand Too. And Jaya Armand consolidated
the chiefdoms in Cambodia and he formed the Kingdom of Anchor,
and he's the one who decides that the Khmer royalty,
the Cambodian royalty, would be linked to the gods, creating
the cult of the devil Rajah, which is literally the
(01:47):
god king or king of the gods. So this proves
to be a very important part of our story, this
close relationship between the the king's and the gods, and
the monuments they would build to both themselves and to
the gods. Right and Anchor is his capital, the capital
of the Khmer or Cambodian Empire from the ninth century
(02:10):
to the fifteenth century a d. Which is known as
the Classical era of Cambodian history. And we are going
to have a little bit of river people descendant. So
we started with the king, but the people were descended
from the Funan of the Mekong Delta and the Khmer
Empire is highly influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism and that
(02:31):
comes from centuries old contact with Indian traders, but they
still retain some of their traditional religions. They kind of
blended blended it all together, right. And this is a
huge territory, we should add. It goes from the tip
of the Indo Chinese Peninsula north to the modern Yunnan
Province in China and from Vietnam westward towards the Bay
(02:52):
of Bengal, which all sounds completely insane. But the city
of Anchor was bigger than Rhode Island, if that gives
you an idea. Yeah. And for such a huge city,
they fund huge construction projects. And the biggest one that
Katie mentioned earlier, Anger Watt, probably the most famous um.
It's a temple complex that was built in the twelfth century.
(03:13):
There's also Anchored Tom, another temple complex which was built
in twelve hundred by King Jaya Armand the seventh. And
it's after that King Jai of Armand the Seventh when
Angor starts to go downhill, and by fourteen thirty one
it's been partially abandoned. By the time the Portuguese come
(03:35):
on the scene Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century, the
empire is thoroughly on its way out. The kings of
Anchor do come back for a little bit in the
sixteenth century, but not for long. So we're wondering what happened.
But in the meantime, Angor lies. I don't want to
(03:55):
say forgotten, because Anchor Watt is maintained by um monks
and hermits, and it's considered an important pilgrimage site in
Southeast Asia all through these sort of down years. But
I think the um vastness of the city of Anchor
is forgotten, at least ignored. Some travelers who um quote
(04:19):
unquote discovered Anchor thought they'd found a lost city founded
by Alexandra the Great or the Roman Empire. They knew
nothing about it. But the French colonial regime in Cambodia
uh found the site, not found it, but they started
getting interested in it in the eighteen sixties and they
partially restored the temples and the reservoirs and canals that
(04:40):
lays through this mammoth complex of anchor and published a
French explorer Andri Muo actually reintroduces the temples to the
West with a journal travels in Siam, Cambodia and Laos
and to bring it up to the present time and
the twentieth century. Of course, there's a lot of war
and upheaval in Cambodia, and there's war damage done to
(05:04):
the site. There's theft, but mostly a lot of neglect
because it's too dangerous of a place for most people
to go to. Yeah, and take care of it, right.
There's engulfing vegetation and erosion, and Sarah made me look
at pictures of strangler figs, which are completely insane. Just
imagine um, it's like a vine flash tree just engulfing
(05:25):
these stone temples. It's ridiculous, So google image that. Yeah,
and in nineteen two becomes a World Heritage Site, which
is a great step to preserving any kind of cultural
monument like this. And by nine it was scammed by
the radar of space Shuttle Endeavor, which turns out to
be a very important key to anchors understanding later on
(05:50):
in the podcast, because there's so much more that we
didn't know about. But let's go back and figure out
what Anchor was like and why we should care about it.
So during the medieval times, the canear erected thousands of
shrines and Anchor and went on a building spree. And
the city it's not just built haphazardly. It's very much
(06:12):
tied to the Hindu idea of the universe. The city
of Ankor actually was a symbolic universe itself that was
structured according to the Hindu cosmology. So, for example, the
outer walls of the temples are meant to recall mountains
that were believed to edge the world, and the reservoirs
(06:33):
and canals and moats that lace through the cities are
meant to symbolize the waters of the cosmos. So it's
a pretty cool idea to to model your city on
the universe. Yes, city planners take note. I'm pretty sure
Atlanta wasn't designed that, though I don't think so. The
temples weren't only religious centers. They were also commercial centers,
and many of them operated as small cities, while other
(06:55):
ones as larger cities. There were up to swhere around
seven in fifty thousand people in Anchor, which was the
capital of the Khmer Kingdom, and it is the most
extensive urban complex of the pre industrial world, so small accomplishment.
We only have one firsthand account, though, of what Angor
(07:16):
was really like, and that's from Zo Daguan, a Chinese
diplomat who visited at the end of the thirteenth century,
and you can find parts of his account on Google
Books if you searched for it. But he discusses a
little bit about the city itself and some about city life.
He talks about entering the city and there's a moat
surrounding it with a border of fifty four giants holding
(07:38):
a snake. There's a golden bridge, gilded lions, a pavilion
supported by stone elephants, um a bronze Buddha in a
lake with water coming out of its belly button. We've
also got stories about fireworks and bore fighting, royal processions
with elephants, horses clad in gold, palace women and flowers.
(07:59):
It all sounds very a luxurious We shouldn't only look
at that side of the account, though. The life for
your average peasant in Anger probably wasn't really great. You
would likely work really hard on the temple because constant
building freeze require constant work from peasants. Uh, you grow
(08:19):
a lot of rice to pay tributes because the whole
system relied on rice's currency. And you'd also probably be
drafted into war because there were constant wars with the
armies in Thailand and Champa, which is Vietnam today. But
he also does talk a little bit about middle class life.
(08:39):
So that would be me and you, Sarah. And the
house he's staying at has matting but no tables, chairs,
or beds. They cook rice over a clay stove and
they sit on mats and eat from ceramic plates and
drink wine from tin cups that's made out of honey,
rice leaves, and water. They sleep on mats on the floor,
and apparently it's so hot people got during the night
(09:00):
to bathe, and a few families all share a ditch
as a latrine, and when it's full, they would dig
another one or have a slave to it. Apparently wealthy
families had more than a hundred slaves each, which they
got from the uplands, and they spoke came here, but
they had no rights. And the other thing I thought
was really interesting was what happened when two families fought.
They would take a member from each family and stick
(09:23):
them each in a tower, and then after a certain
period of time, you would get to come out of
confinement and they would look to see what sort of
ailments you'd had. You know, perhaps you'd had a fever
or some other sickness, and that's how they determined who
was guilty. It's so weirdly passive. I keep thinking of
Funny Python and the Holy Grail because I tried to
apply that to most things. But you know, I figure
(09:44):
out whether she's a which, figure out who's guilty, and
the king's punishments could range from a fine to crushing
your limbs. So I hope you weren't the one who
got the fever. And they also collected human goal from
I've read that too. That was weird with the thought
to give both men and elephants courage. And if you
(10:05):
were a person who needed courage, you could drink it
mixed with wine. If you were an elephant, you would
have it poured over you in a different mixture. But
they had a commoner way would be the best way
to go. There was someone who was supposed to drink,
so you know, human goal courage for elephants. Things you learned,
but Unfortunately, this amazing account we have from Zoo is
(10:26):
that's it. We have things that were carved on the
stone temples, but all of the administrative buildings and the
homes from the highest person to the lowest were made
of wood, and consequently you haven't survived. So we have
very little to go on when we're trying to figure
out how ankor fell. What happened, and the historically suspected
(10:49):
causes are invaders, religion changes, maritime trade kind of shuts
down the coastal city, and um, so we have to
get us, which is one of those use your own
ending podcast. We're going to give you some options and
you can pick what you think makes the most sense.
So one option is rivalry. The Canary kings each had
(11:12):
a few wives and several children, and so there were
constant battles over which baby would be the king, and
plenty of usurpers to the throne. As Sarah said, it
was like the War of the Roses times Azilian. Imagine
just never knowing who was going to be the next king.
That puts a lot of no clear line of succession. Yeah,
and then another potential problem was war. Some think that
(11:36):
the warriors from the Iataiah state sacked Anchor in and
they did invade the city and made off with a
lot of treasure in women, but they probably didn't completely
destroy the city. Well, obviously they didn't completely destroy We
have some less um, they didn't damage it severely, And
(11:57):
some historians think that's unlikely because as the ruler of
the Aetayah installs his son on the throne, So why
would you completely sack the city and destroy most of
it if you're installing your son on the throne. And
that brings us to option three, which is religion. Anthropologists
call Anchor the regal ritual city. They love religion, it's
(12:19):
a big part of their daily lives, and the kings
are the world emperors of Hindu lore. But by the
thirteenth and fourteen centuries, Terravada Buddhism starts to surpass Hinduism,
and it preaches social quality, which isn't something that was
a big part of life in Anchor. So perhaps slaving
away at growing rice just to give it to the
king for his um gilded elephant processions doesn't sounds so
(12:43):
appealing anymore. No, it really didn't, because that whole regal
ritual thing relied on tribute and taxes, so you were
paying for these insanely luxurious ceremony and as we already said,
the currency is rice, so you're growing huge amounts of
rice to feed priests and the dancers and the concubine, yeah,
(13:03):
the temple workers. And it just, uh, this is a
plausible explanation for why this society would collapse bolts. But
we have another option. That's that it was just plain abandoned,
that the royal court ditched the city. And this is
plausible because the rulers were obsessed with building their own
(13:25):
new temples, they wouldn't take care of the old ones.
Most of our kind of cultural monuments, at least public monuments,
there is a certain amount of upkeep and um, and
you know people people like things that are old. But
that was not the case with the Anchor rulers. You
knew they would just let the old ones fall into
(13:46):
into decay. Kind of reminded me a little bit about
the It kind of reminded me a little bit of
the Egyptian pharaoh's pilfering the rocks from the old pyramids
and stuff. But so it's possible that the rulers just
left the town headed to a location closer to the
Mekong River, which is near Cambodia's modern capital of PanAm Pen,
(14:12):
and that way they could have easier sea trading and um,
just move on with the times. But there is an
even more modern theory, which is water trouble. The empire's
growth depended on huge rice harvests, and to do that,
of course, you need a steady water supply. And we
(14:32):
mentioned earlier how good it engineering this particular empire was,
but it wasn't just engineering amazing tempo complexes and things
to worship their rulers and gods. We were talking about
all the canals and the reservoirs, and that does more
than symbolize the Hindu cosmology of oceans and water. They
(14:56):
also were legitimate reservoirs and the uh. There's a great
article in the National Geographic from a few months back
by Richard Stone which puts forth the idea that the
civilization rose because they figured out a way to manage
the monsoon season, which you know, it's kind of an
(15:18):
on or off rain switch, right, And once you're not
dependent on the weather like that, you have time to
do things like build great civilizations. Yeah, because you can
increase your rice yields. You can grow during times of
year where you normally wouldn't be able to grow rice.
And so this theory suggests that they rose to prominence
because they figured out how to manipulate this, and that
(15:40):
maybe they fell because they lost that control. They built
one reservoir you talked about. I think that's what five
miles long by one and a half miles wide the Westbury. Yeah,
these aren't huge. If you see a picture of it,
it I mean, I can't even compare it to a
pool or something like that. It looks like a lake,
(16:02):
except that it's perfectly rectangular. And here's how it worked.
During the summer monsoon months, the overflow channels took care
of the excess water to save it for later. The
rain stopped in October November, and the irrigation channels dispensed
the stored water. So, yeah, you can grow rice when
you shouldn't be able to, and you're not going to
(16:23):
be quite as flooded as you normally would be during
the monsoon season. And one of the ways that we
figured out how these reservoirs worked, where those NOWSA images
we were talking about or endeavor, and they were great
because they showed areas that were still inaccessible because of
violence and Cambodia or just lawlessness in certain areas. And
(16:47):
the images showed that the berets or these big reservoirs
had inlets and outlets, so that proved that they were
for irrigation, they weren't just for religious purposes. But by
the early thirteenth century, the waterworks began to deteriorate, and
we're not quite sure why that happened. It might have
been that floods broke some of the masonry, or it
(17:10):
just became two massive a system for the engineers to handle.
You can kind of think of Atlanta's own sewer system,
which a massive overhaul. Yeah, there's there's not much you
can do about it unless you embark on a massive overhaul,
and they might have not been equipped to do that,
as we're not either. But um, the thirteenth century surprised
(17:34):
people because it was a little early for the trouble
to start. If you're paying attention to the timeline anchor
was still around in the sixteenth century. Yeah, but here's
what suspected to have happened. So while the waterworks are
in disrepair. That's a problem, but maybe manageable if you
still have a regular monsoon season. But unfortunately their disrepair
(17:58):
coincides perfectly with the beginning of the Little Ice Age,
and that's something that people have long known happened in
Europe starting in and going on for a couple of centuries.
It contributed to really abnormally cold winters and unseasonably cold summers,
(18:19):
and but until recently people didn't know if this also
extended to Asia, and it definitely did, and it made
Anchor experience these mega droughts. Sometimes there was no monsoon
at all, sometimes there was huge monsoon. Basically nothing you
can plan against, and if you're already falling apart, you're
not equipped to handle it. So if you have an
unstable monsoon season and um water works that are failing,
(18:44):
you can't guarantee a harvest. And we know that the
Little Ice Age did hit Asia in part because of Poemu.
I think that's how you say it. Cypress tree rings. Um.
Some of these trees are nine centuries old, so they
were around in the height of anger and in its fall,
and they show stress, like major stress from the monsoons.
(19:09):
Heavy monsoons, no monsoons, and of course with all of
this water trouble, we end up with a low rice yield,
which could lead to starving turmoil, a week army and
so on. And so that's why they choose your own ending.
Any of them could really be right because we can
have this water centered answer. But if your people are
(19:30):
starving because there's no water to grow rice, or you know,
you're flooded out and you can't grow rice, um your
army is underfed, you're more susceptible to the Iataia invaders.
And it kind of ties all the all the endings
together in an interesting way. And there's another environmental theory
(19:51):
about environmental degradation causing the fall of Anchor, which was
about deforestation and over using the land, which some people
think led to flood and silted canals, which are really
no good. Yeah, if you silt silt up your water works,
they're not going to really do you any good anymore. Well,
all of these possibilities are interesting to ponder. Hopefully we'll
(20:12):
have a chance to figure out the real answer. Now
that Cambodia is open for tourism. Yeah, it's actually a
big source of money for Cambodia. Now, which you know
couldn't really have much of a tourist trade for decades
because of war and internal strife. But um unfortunately the
tourism also threatens the structural integrity of the temples. There's
(20:33):
always a double down. But the same thing about POMPEII.
We're reading about people coming to see POMPEII and then
touching every Yeah, they're winning it. Erosion problems from just
physical contact, but also new resorts and hotels springing up
are supposedly sucking the groundwater dry beneath Ancor, which weakened
some of the foundations of the buildings. And if you're
(20:55):
looking to go loot some antiquities, there actually aren't many
left after sent reads of people doing so. Some are
in France and some are in Cambodia's National Museum very
far away. Well, I for one, would definitely like to
visit Anchor and Anchor Watt and the whole Shabang. So
would I, and I think it would be a lot
easier to visit than Atlantis, considering we don't know where
(21:16):
it is, or the north to Chico, considering that they're gone. Well,
I think that about wraps it up, unless we think
of any more lost cities to talk of in the future,
So if you'd like to read more, check out our
article five abandoned Cities, and don't forget to check out
our blog, which you can find on the homepage at
www dot how stuff works dot com. For more on
(21:37):
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
dot com. Let us know what you think, send an
email to podcast at how stuff works dot com, and
be sure to check out the stuff you missed in
History Glass blog on the how stuff works dot com
home page.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And if you've
been listening to the podcast, you know how much Katie
and I love a good lost city. We've talked about
(00:22):
Atlantis recently, and a little while before that we talked
about the North Chico in South America. So these cities
that disappear, or empires that appear out of nowhere and
then disappear again seemed to fascinate us. So today we're
going to do the lost city of Anchor. And when
Sarah said this earlier, I was like, oh, you want
(00:43):
to talk about Anchor Watt and she said, no, there's
a lot more to it than that's just one temple, Katie.
So today it's ruins and peasants who grow rice in
northwestern Cambodia. That's what you think of when you're thinking
of Ancre Watt. But back in medieval times it was
something else. It was a very impress us, a very
huge city with a lot of amazing works of engineering.
(01:04):
But what went wrong? Well, to do that, let's start
out with a little bit of background on Anchor, which
starts in a D. Eight hundred and Sarah was saying,
it's lovely to be able to start with one person
instead of the people from this river came and exactly
nice to have one warrior type guy coming into the
picture early on. And in this case it's a powerful
(01:27):
regional king named Jaya Armand Too. And Jaya Armand consolidated
the chiefdoms in Cambodia and he formed the Kingdom of Anchor,
and he's the one who decides that the Khmer royalty,
the Cambodian royalty, would be linked to the gods, creating
the cult of the devil Rajah, which is literally the
(01:47):
god king or king of the gods. So this proves
to be a very important part of our story, this
close relationship between the the king's and the gods, and
the monuments they would build to both themselves and to
the gods. Right and Anchor is his capital, the capital
of the Khmer or Cambodian Empire from the ninth century
(02:10):
to the fifteenth century a d. Which is known as
the Classical era of Cambodian history. And we are going
to have a little bit of river people descendant. So
we started with the king, but the people were descended
from the Funan of the Mekong Delta and the Khmer
Empire is highly influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism and that
(02:31):
comes from centuries old contact with Indian traders, but they
still retain some of their traditional religions. They kind of
blended blended it all together, right. And this is a
huge territory, we should add. It goes from the tip
of the Indo Chinese Peninsula north to the modern Yunnan
Province in China and from Vietnam westward towards the Bay
(02:52):
of Bengal, which all sounds completely insane. But the city
of Anchor was bigger than Rhode Island, if that gives
you an idea. Yeah. And for such a huge city,
they fund huge construction projects. And the biggest one that
Katie mentioned earlier, Anger Watt, probably the most famous um.
It's a temple complex that was built in the twelfth century.
(03:13):
There's also Anchored Tom, another temple complex which was built
in twelve hundred by King Jaya Armand the seventh. And
it's after that King Jai of Armand the Seventh when
Angor starts to go downhill, and by fourteen thirty one
it's been partially abandoned. By the time the Portuguese come
(03:35):
on the scene Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century, the
empire is thoroughly on its way out. The kings of
Anchor do come back for a little bit in the
sixteenth century, but not for long. So we're wondering what happened.
But in the meantime, Angor lies. I don't want to
(03:55):
say forgotten, because Anchor Watt is maintained by um monks
and hermits, and it's considered an important pilgrimage site in
Southeast Asia all through these sort of down years. But
I think the um vastness of the city of Anchor
is forgotten, at least ignored. Some travelers who um quote
(04:19):
unquote discovered Anchor thought they'd found a lost city founded
by Alexandra the Great or the Roman Empire. They knew
nothing about it. But the French colonial regime in Cambodia
uh found the site, not found it, but they started
getting interested in it in the eighteen sixties and they
partially restored the temples and the reservoirs and canals that
(04:40):
lays through this mammoth complex of anchor and published a
French explorer Andri Muo actually reintroduces the temples to the
West with a journal travels in Siam, Cambodia and Laos
and to bring it up to the present time and
the twentieth century. Of course, there's a lot of war
and upheaval in Cambodia, and there's war damage done to
(05:04):
the site. There's theft, but mostly a lot of neglect
because it's too dangerous of a place for most people
to go to. Yeah, and take care of it, right.
There's engulfing vegetation and erosion, and Sarah made me look
at pictures of strangler figs, which are completely insane. Just
imagine um, it's like a vine flash tree just engulfing
(05:25):
these stone temples. It's ridiculous, So google image that. Yeah,
and in nineteen two becomes a World Heritage Site, which
is a great step to preserving any kind of cultural
monument like this. And by nine it was scammed by
the radar of space Shuttle Endeavor, which turns out to
be a very important key to anchors understanding later on
(05:50):
in the podcast, because there's so much more that we
didn't know about. But let's go back and figure out
what Anchor was like and why we should care about it.
So during the medieval times, the canear erected thousands of
shrines and Anchor and went on a building spree. And
the city it's not just built haphazardly. It's very much
(06:12):
tied to the Hindu idea of the universe. The city
of Ankor actually was a symbolic universe itself that was
structured according to the Hindu cosmology. So, for example, the
outer walls of the temples are meant to recall mountains
that were believed to edge the world, and the reservoirs
(06:33):
and canals and moats that lace through the cities are
meant to symbolize the waters of the cosmos. So it's
a pretty cool idea to to model your city on
the universe. Yes, city planners take note. I'm pretty sure
Atlanta wasn't designed that, though I don't think so. The
temples weren't only religious centers. They were also commercial centers,
and many of them operated as small cities, while other
(06:55):
ones as larger cities. There were up to swhere around
seven in fifty thousand people in Anchor, which was the
capital of the Khmer Kingdom, and it is the most
extensive urban complex of the pre industrial world, so small accomplishment.
We only have one firsthand account, though, of what Angor
(07:16):
was really like, and that's from Zo Daguan, a Chinese
diplomat who visited at the end of the thirteenth century,
and you can find parts of his account on Google
Books if you searched for it. But he discusses a
little bit about the city itself and some about city life.
He talks about entering the city and there's a moat
surrounding it with a border of fifty four giants holding
(07:38):
a snake. There's a golden bridge, gilded lions, a pavilion
supported by stone elephants, um a bronze Buddha in a
lake with water coming out of its belly button. We've
also got stories about fireworks and bore fighting, royal processions
with elephants, horses clad in gold, palace women and flowers.
(07:59):
It all sounds very a luxurious We shouldn't only look
at that side of the account, though. The life for
your average peasant in Anger probably wasn't really great. You
would likely work really hard on the temple because constant
building freeze require constant work from peasants. Uh, you grow
(08:19):
a lot of rice to pay tributes because the whole
system relied on rice's currency. And you'd also probably be
drafted into war because there were constant wars with the
armies in Thailand and Champa, which is Vietnam today. But
he also does talk a little bit about middle class life.
(08:39):
So that would be me and you, Sarah. And the
house he's staying at has matting but no tables, chairs,
or beds. They cook rice over a clay stove and
they sit on mats and eat from ceramic plates and
drink wine from tin cups that's made out of honey,
rice leaves, and water. They sleep on mats on the floor,
and apparently it's so hot people got during the night
(09:00):
to bathe, and a few families all share a ditch
as a latrine, and when it's full, they would dig
another one or have a slave to it. Apparently wealthy
families had more than a hundred slaves each, which they
got from the uplands, and they spoke came here, but
they had no rights. And the other thing I thought
was really interesting was what happened when two families fought.
They would take a member from each family and stick
(09:23):
them each in a tower, and then after a certain
period of time, you would get to come out of
confinement and they would look to see what sort of
ailments you'd had. You know, perhaps you'd had a fever
or some other sickness, and that's how they determined who
was guilty. It's so weirdly passive. I keep thinking of
Funny Python and the Holy Grail because I tried to
apply that to most things. But you know, I figure
(09:44):
out whether she's a which, figure out who's guilty, and
the king's punishments could range from a fine to crushing
your limbs. So I hope you weren't the one who
got the fever. And they also collected human goal from
I've read that too. That was weird with the thought
to give both men and elephants courage. And if you
(10:05):
were a person who needed courage, you could drink it
mixed with wine. If you were an elephant, you would
have it poured over you in a different mixture. But
they had a commoner way would be the best way
to go. There was someone who was supposed to drink,
so you know, human goal courage for elephants. Things you learned,
but Unfortunately, this amazing account we have from Zoo is
(10:26):
that's it. We have things that were carved on the
stone temples, but all of the administrative buildings and the
homes from the highest person to the lowest were made
of wood, and consequently you haven't survived. So we have
very little to go on when we're trying to figure
out how ankor fell. What happened, and the historically suspected
(10:49):
causes are invaders, religion changes, maritime trade kind of shuts
down the coastal city, and um, so we have to
get us, which is one of those use your own
ending podcast. We're going to give you some options and
you can pick what you think makes the most sense.
So one option is rivalry. The Canary kings each had
(11:12):
a few wives and several children, and so there were
constant battles over which baby would be the king, and
plenty of usurpers to the throne. As Sarah said, it
was like the War of the Roses times Azilian. Imagine
just never knowing who was going to be the next king.
That puts a lot of no clear line of succession. Yeah,
and then another potential problem was war. Some think that
(11:36):
the warriors from the Iataiah state sacked Anchor in and
they did invade the city and made off with a
lot of treasure in women, but they probably didn't completely
destroy the city. Well, obviously they didn't completely destroy We
have some less um, they didn't damage it severely, And
(11:57):
some historians think that's unlikely because as the ruler of
the Aetayah installs his son on the throne, So why
would you completely sack the city and destroy most of
it if you're installing your son on the throne. And
that brings us to option three, which is religion. Anthropologists
call Anchor the regal ritual city. They love religion, it's
(12:19):
a big part of their daily lives, and the kings
are the world emperors of Hindu lore. But by the
thirteenth and fourteen centuries, Terravada Buddhism starts to surpass Hinduism,
and it preaches social quality, which isn't something that was
a big part of life in Anchor. So perhaps slaving
away at growing rice just to give it to the
king for his um gilded elephant processions doesn't sounds so
(12:43):
appealing anymore. No, it really didn't, because that whole regal
ritual thing relied on tribute and taxes, so you were
paying for these insanely luxurious ceremony and as we already said,
the currency is rice, so you're growing huge amounts of
rice to feed priests and the dancers and the concubine, yeah,
(13:03):
the temple workers. And it just, uh, this is a
plausible explanation for why this society would collapse bolts. But
we have another option. That's that it was just plain abandoned,
that the royal court ditched the city. And this is
plausible because the rulers were obsessed with building their own
(13:25):
new temples, they wouldn't take care of the old ones.
Most of our kind of cultural monuments, at least public monuments,
there is a certain amount of upkeep and um, and
you know people people like things that are old. But
that was not the case with the Anchor rulers. You
knew they would just let the old ones fall into
(13:46):
into decay. Kind of reminded me a little bit about
the It kind of reminded me a little bit of
the Egyptian pharaoh's pilfering the rocks from the old pyramids
and stuff. But so it's possible that the rulers just
left the town headed to a location closer to the
Mekong River, which is near Cambodia's modern capital of PanAm Pen,
(14:12):
and that way they could have easier sea trading and um,
just move on with the times. But there is an
even more modern theory, which is water trouble. The empire's
growth depended on huge rice harvests, and to do that,
of course, you need a steady water supply. And we
(14:32):
mentioned earlier how good it engineering this particular empire was,
but it wasn't just engineering amazing tempo complexes and things
to worship their rulers and gods. We were talking about
all the canals and the reservoirs, and that does more
than symbolize the Hindu cosmology of oceans and water. They
(14:56):
also were legitimate reservoirs and the uh. There's a great
article in the National Geographic from a few months back
by Richard Stone which puts forth the idea that the
civilization rose because they figured out a way to manage
the monsoon season, which you know, it's kind of an
(15:18):
on or off rain switch, right, And once you're not
dependent on the weather like that, you have time to
do things like build great civilizations. Yeah, because you can
increase your rice yields. You can grow during times of
year where you normally wouldn't be able to grow rice.
And so this theory suggests that they rose to prominence
because they figured out how to manipulate this, and that
(15:40):
maybe they fell because they lost that control. They built
one reservoir you talked about. I think that's what five
miles long by one and a half miles wide the Westbury. Yeah,
these aren't huge. If you see a picture of it,
it I mean, I can't even compare it to a
pool or something like that. It looks like a lake,
(16:02):
except that it's perfectly rectangular. And here's how it worked.
During the summer monsoon months, the overflow channels took care
of the excess water to save it for later. The
rain stopped in October November, and the irrigation channels dispensed
the stored water. So, yeah, you can grow rice when
you shouldn't be able to, and you're not going to
(16:23):
be quite as flooded as you normally would be during
the monsoon season. And one of the ways that we
figured out how these reservoirs worked, where those NOWSA images
we were talking about or endeavor, and they were great
because they showed areas that were still inaccessible because of
violence and Cambodia or just lawlessness in certain areas. And
(16:47):
the images showed that the berets or these big reservoirs
had inlets and outlets, so that proved that they were
for irrigation, they weren't just for religious purposes. But by
the early thirteenth century, the waterworks began to deteriorate, and
we're not quite sure why that happened. It might have
been that floods broke some of the masonry, or it
(17:10):
just became two massive a system for the engineers to handle.
You can kind of think of Atlanta's own sewer system,
which a massive overhaul. Yeah, there's there's not much you
can do about it unless you embark on a massive overhaul,
and they might have not been equipped to do that,
as we're not either. But um, the thirteenth century surprised
(17:34):
people because it was a little early for the trouble
to start. If you're paying attention to the timeline anchor
was still around in the sixteenth century. Yeah, but here's
what suspected to have happened. So while the waterworks are
in disrepair. That's a problem, but maybe manageable if you
still have a regular monsoon season. But unfortunately their disrepair
(17:58):
coincides perfectly with the beginning of the Little Ice Age,
and that's something that people have long known happened in
Europe starting in and going on for a couple of centuries.
It contributed to really abnormally cold winters and unseasonably cold summers,
(18:19):
and but until recently people didn't know if this also
extended to Asia, and it definitely did, and it made
Anchor experience these mega droughts. Sometimes there was no monsoon
at all, sometimes there was huge monsoon. Basically nothing you
can plan against, and if you're already falling apart, you're
not equipped to handle it. So if you have an
unstable monsoon season and um water works that are failing,
(18:44):
you can't guarantee a harvest. And we know that the
Little Ice Age did hit Asia in part because of Poemu.
I think that's how you say it. Cypress tree rings. Um.
Some of these trees are nine centuries old, so they
were around in the height of anger and in its fall,
and they show stress, like major stress from the monsoons.
(19:09):
Heavy monsoons, no monsoons, and of course with all of
this water trouble, we end up with a low rice yield,
which could lead to starving turmoil, a week army and
so on. And so that's why they choose your own ending.
Any of them could really be right because we can
have this water centered answer. But if your people are
(19:30):
starving because there's no water to grow rice, or you know,
you're flooded out and you can't grow rice, um your
army is underfed, you're more susceptible to the Iataia invaders.
And it kind of ties all the all the endings
together in an interesting way. And there's another environmental theory
(19:51):
about environmental degradation causing the fall of Anchor, which was
about deforestation and over using the land, which some people
think led to flood and silted canals, which are really
no good. Yeah, if you silt silt up your water works,
they're not going to really do you any good anymore. Well,
all of these possibilities are interesting to ponder. Hopefully we'll
(20:12):
have a chance to figure out the real answer. Now
that Cambodia is open for tourism. Yeah, it's actually a
big source of money for Cambodia. Now, which you know
couldn't really have much of a tourist trade for decades
because of war and internal strife. But um unfortunately the
tourism also threatens the structural integrity of the temples. There's
(20:33):
always a double down. But the same thing about POMPEII.
We're reading about people coming to see POMPEII and then
touching every Yeah, they're winning it. Erosion problems from just
physical contact, but also new resorts and hotels springing up
are supposedly sucking the groundwater dry beneath Ancor, which weakened
some of the foundations of the buildings. And if you're
(20:55):
looking to go loot some antiquities, there actually aren't many
left after sent reads of people doing so. Some are
in France and some are in Cambodia's National Museum very
far away. Well, I for one, would definitely like to
visit Anchor and Anchor Watt and the whole Shabang. So
would I, and I think it would be a lot
easier to visit than Atlantis, considering we don't know where
(21:16):
it is, or the north to Chico, considering that they're gone. Well,
I think that about wraps it up, unless we think
of any more lost cities to talk of in the future,
So if you'd like to read more, check out our
article five abandoned Cities, and don't forget to check out
our blog, which you can find on the homepage at
www dot how stuff works dot com. For more on
(21:37):
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
dot com. Let us know what you think, send an
email to podcast at how stuff works dot com, and
be sure to check out the stuff you missed in
History Glass blog on the how stuff works dot com
home page.
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