This blog documents what remains when we abandon our buildings, homes, schools, and factories. These decaying structures represent our impact on the world: where we lived, worked, and built. The blog also shows examples of where decay was averted or reversed with hard work and imagination.
The monumental temple of Angkor Wat is huge in every possible dimension. The central towers were taller than the steeples of Notre Dame. Angkor Wat defies the imagination. How did they build this? How did the emperors pay for it? How much of the city-state's annual GDP went to construction and maintenance? From Wikipedia,
Angkor Wat (/ˌæŋkɔːr ˈwɒt/; Khmer: អង្គរវត្ត, lit. 'temple city / city of temples', located in northwest Cambodia, is the largest religious structure (temple complex) in the world by land area, measuring 162.6 hectares (401+3⁄4 acres). At the centre of the temple stands a quincunx of four towers surrounding a central spire that rises to a height of 65 m (213 ft) above the ground. The temple has three rectangular galleries, each raised above the next. It lies within an outer wall 3.6 kilometres (2+1⁄4 miles) long and a moat more than five kilometres (three miles) long.
The temple was built at the behest of Suryavarman II in the early 12th century in Yaśodharapura (យសោធរបុរៈ, present-day Angkor), the capital of the Khmer Empire, as the state temple for the empire. Originally constructed as a personal mausoleum for Suryavarman, dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu in the early 12th century, it was converted to a Buddhist temple towards the end of the 12th century.
Moat at Angkor Wat
Monumental guard lions at Angkor Wat. Do these look like Egyptian sculptures?
The carved lions guarded the monumental entryways. It is not hard to understand how the regal lion was used as a symbol of royalty and power from Egypt to Mesopotamia to Angkor to China.
Celestial dancers, second level gallery
Thousands of these bas relief maidens line the halls. Every one is individual, but the feet are always sideways. According to the excellent and readable description of Angkor Was in tourismcambodia,
The starkness of the exterior of the second level gallery is offset by the decoration of the interior. Over 1,500 Apsaras (celestial dancers) line the walls of the gallery offering endless visual and spiritual enchantment. These graceful and beautiful females delight all visitors. They were crated by the Churning of the Ocean of Milk.
When one first walks into the courtyard the multitude of female figures on the walls and in the niches may seem repetitive but as one moves closer and looks carefully one sees that every one of these celestial nymphs is different, the elaborate coiffures, headdresses and jewellery befit, yet never overpower, these 'ethereal inhabitants of the heavens' Apsaras appear at Angkor Wat for the first time in twos and threes. These groups break with the traditional of decoration kin other part of the temple by standing with arms linked in coquettish postures and always in frontal view except for the feet, which appear in profile.
Note the amazing snake motif hairstyles. Also note that the big toe on the left foot is raised. I wonder what the symbolism is for the toe?
Waiting for the selfie, Angkor Wat
le coq sportif and the Celestial Dancers
Ah, the contemporary lovelies. But the big toes are not pointing up. And the hair is a bit boring.
Siem Reap
Siem Reap is the main urban area south of the temple complexes and is the location for most (or all ) hotels. It has an international airport to support the tourist trade.
Wait a minute. There is a temple with a pool in Siem Reap? Oh, no, this is just the Sokha Angkor Resort. It looks like the Cambodians still believe in monumental architecture.
Dorky Americans in Siam Reap
Typical lunch
Extensive breakfast buffets, attentive and utterly polite staff, immaculate cleanliness - this is the life. Many of the other hotels in Siem are similarly spectacular. They put to shame what we call "luxury" hotels here in USA, let alone the quality of the cuisine.
The black and white scenes are digital images from an Olympus E-330 4/3 camera. I applied a pseudo Ektachrome simulation using DxO 5 software, which created the subtle selenium/purple tone.
One of the most total and overwhelming examples of the collapse and disappearance of a civilization is the Khmer Empire (Khmer: ចក្រភពខ្មែរ) or the Angkor Empire (Khmer: ចក្រភពអង្គរ), whose remains are in present-day Cambodia. The empire thrived from the 9th - 15th centuries, during which the emperors developed a society of immense wealth and sophistication. At its peak, the capital, Angkor, covered 1000 square miles. The empire depended on a highly sophisticated water supply system consisting of reservoirs and canals. The reservoirs stored water during the monsoon and distributed it in the dry season. Some evidence shows that the large ponds surrounding the palaces had fish aquaculture. The city state grew in population until it exceeded 1 million, far exceeding any European city at the time.
Moat at Ankor Wat. Was this once used for fish aquaculture? Note the perfect linear steps.
"Its greatest legacy is Angkor, in present-day Cambodia, which was the site of the capital city during the empire's zenith. The majestic monuments of Angkor — such as Angkor Wat and Bayon — bear testimony to the Khmer empire's immense power and wealth, impressive art and culture, architectural technique and aesthetics achievements, as well as the variety of belief systems that it patronised over time. Recently satellite imaging has revealed Angkor to be the largest pre-industrial urban center in the world."
What caused the collapse? Common hypotheses include:
Warfare (as an example, the destruction the Inca and Aztecs)
Environmental degradation and collapse (Easter Island)
Political decay and inability to maintain the colossal infrastructure
Disease or a pandemic
Demographic changes (i.e., low birthrates or mass migration)
Does possibility 3 sound like the path down which we are heading in USA? We have:
Political paralysis
Massive crumbling infrastructure
Money squandered on foreign wars and transfer payments
Corruption in the highest offices of the government as well as local governments
Looming water shortages in areas that are over-populated considering their natural resources (i.e., much of the US West)
A portion of the population in open revolt against the central government
Other major city-state complexes around the world collapsed, sometimes in a surprisingly short time (only years or decades). The Olmecs of Mesoamerica - little is known of them. The Maya abandoned their homes and just disappeared. The Inca collapsed in a few years in the face of Spanish invasion and the subsequent disease. The Nazca disappeared; there is no sign of them other than their colossal patterns in the desert. The Indus or Harappan civilization is gone. Cairo and the lower Nile valley may be the lone survivor of long-term habitation. Possibly sophisticated city life is just a temporary phase in human development - it starts and thrives for a period with great ambition and energy and then crumbles apart catastrophically. The Wikipedia article on Societal collapse makes for good reading.
The incredible complex of temples, ruins, and giant smothering trees at Ankor is one of the world's great photographic topics. The stones, rocks, carved faces, and encroaching jungle are endlessly fascinating. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom include scenes filmed here.
"In 1186 A.D., Jayavarman VII
embarked on a massive program of construction and public works.
Rajavihara ("monastery of the king"), today known as Ta Prohm ("ancestor
Brahma"), was one of the first temples founded pursuant to that
program. The stele commemorating the foundation gives a date of 1186 A.D."
After the Khmer Empire collapsed in the 15th century, Ta Phohm was neglected and the jungle slowly engulfed the complex. What happened to the priests and the 100,000 villagers who at one time served the temple complex? Archaeologists have left this temple largely unrestored, although some walls have been stabilized to prevent further collapse.
As you can see, the roots of these huge trees have engulfed the ancient walls, like some fantastic giant octopus crawling over the walls. From Wikipedia,
"The trees growing out of the ruins are perhaps the most distinctive
feature of Ta Prohm, and "have prompted more writers to descriptive
excess than any other feature of Angkor." Two species predominate, but sources disagree on their identification: the larger is either the silk-cotton tree (Ceiba pentandra) or thitpok Tetrameles nudiflora, and the smaller is either the strangler fig (Ficus gibbosa) or gold apple (Diospyros decandra). Angkor scholar Maurice Glaize
observed, "On every side, in fantastic over-scale, the trunks of the
silk-cotton trees soar skywards under a shadowy green canopy, their long
spreading skirts trailing the ground and their endless roots coiling
more like reptiles than plants."
No wonder filmmakers like to shoot scenes here! Think of these tentacles in your sleep.
Temple of Banteay Srei
Detail of carved sandstone, Banteay Srei
Door ornamentation at Banteay Srei. Note the sophisticated figurine carving.
"Banteay Srei or Banteay Srey (Khmer: ប្រាសាទបន្ទាយស្រី) is a 10th-century Cambodian temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. Located in the area of Angkor, it lies near the hill of Phnom Dei, 25 km (16 mi) north-east of the main group of temples that once belonged to the medieval capitals of Yasodharapura and Angkor Thom. Banteay Srei is built largely of red sandstone,
a medium that lends itself to the elaborate decorative wall carvings
which are still observable today. The buildings themselves are
miniature in scale, unusually so when measured by the standards of
Angkorian construction. These factors have made the temple extremely
popular with tourists, and have led to its being widely praised as a
"precious gem", or the "jewel of Khmer art."
Monumental entry hall, Banteay Srei
Guardian lions, entry hall, Banteai Srei. Do these look Egyptian to you?
Just imagine the monumental cost of mining, transporting, carving, and erecting all this stone. And look at the astonishing quality of the rock carving. Did the workers have early-technology steel tools for this work? How did the Khmer emperors/kings afford these projects?
Deep
in the Cambodian jungle lie the remains of a vast medieval city, which
was hidden for centuries. New archaeological techniques are now
revealing its secrets - including an elaborate network of temples and
boulevards, and sophisticated engineering.
In
April 1858 a young French explorer, Henri Mouhot, sailed from London to
south-east Asia. For the next three years he travelled widely,
discovering exotic jungle insects that still bear his name.
Today
he would be all but forgotten were it not for his journal, published in
1863, two years after he died of fever in Laos, aged just 35.
Mouhot's account captured the public imagination, but not because of the beetles and spiders he found.
Readers
were gripped by his vivid descriptions of vast temples consumed by the
jungle: Mouhot introduced the world to the lost medieval city of Angkor
in Cambodia and its romantic, awe-inspiring splendour.
"One
of these temples, a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some
ancient Michelangelo, might take an honourable place beside our most
beautiful buildings. It is grander than anything left to us by Greece
or Rome," he wrote.
His
descriptions firmly established in popular culture the beguiling
fantasy of swashbuckling explorers finding forgotten temples.
Today
Cambodia is famous for these buildings. The largest, Angkor Wat,
constructed around 1150, remains the biggest religious complex on Earth,
covering an area four times larger than Vatican City.
It attracts two million tourists a year and takes pride of place on Cambodia's flag.
But
back in the 1860s Angkor Wat was virtually unheard of beyond local
monks and villagers. The notion that this great temple was once
surrounded by a city of nearly a million people was entirely unknown.
It
took over a century of gruelling archaeological fieldwork to fill in
the map. The lost city of Angkor slowly began to reappear, street by
street. But even then significant blanks remained.
Then,
last year, archaeologists announced a series of new discoveries - about
Angkor, and an even older city hidden deep in the jungle beyond.
An
international team, led by the University of Sydney's Dr Damian Evans,
had mapped 370 sq km around Angkor in unprecedented detail - no mean
feat given the density of the jungle and the prevalence of landmines
from Cambodia's civil war. Yet the entire survey took less than two
weeks.
Their secret?
Lidar - a sophisticated remote sensing technology that is revolutionising archaeology, especially in the tropics.
Mounted
on a helicopter criss-crossing the countryside, the team's lidar device
fired a million laser beams every four seconds through the jungle
canopy, recording minute variations in ground surface topography.
The findings were staggering.
The
archaeologists found undocumented cityscapes etched on to the forest
floor, with temples, highways and elaborate waterways spreading across
the landscape.
"You
have this kind of sudden eureka moment where you bring the data up on
screen the first time and there it is - this ancient city very clearly
in front of you," says Dr Evans.
These new discoveries have profoundly transformed our understanding of Angkor, the greatest medieval city on Earth.
At
its peak, in the late 12th Century, Angkor was a bustling metropolis
covering 1,000 sq km. (It would be another 700 years before London
reached a similar size.)
Angkor
was once the capital of the mighty Khmer empire which, ruled by warrior
kings, dominated the region for centuries - covering all of present-day
Cambodia and much of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. But its
origins and birthplace have long been shrouded in mystery.
A
few meagre inscriptions suggested the empire was founded in the early
9th Century by a great king, Jayavarman II, and that his original
capital, Mahendraparvata, was somewhere in the Kulen hills, a forested
plateau north-east of the site on which Angkor would later be built.
But no-one knew for sure - until the lidar team arrived.
The
lidar survey of the hills revealed ghostly outlines on the forest floor
of unknown temples and an elaborate and utterly unexpected grid of
ceremonial boulevards, dykes and man-made ponds - a lost city, found.
Lidar technology has revealed the original city of Angkor - red lines indicate modern features including roads and canals. Image copyright Khmer Archaeology LiDAR Consortium
Most striking of all was evidence of large-scale hydraulic engineering, the defining signature of the Khmer empire.
By
the time the royal capital moved south to Angkor around the end of the
9th Century, Khmer engineers were storing and distributing vast
quantities of precious seasonal monsoon water using a complex network of
huge canals and reservoirs.
Harnessing
the monsoon provided food security - and made the ruling elite
fantastically rich. For the next three centuries they channelled their
wealth into the greatest concentration of temples on Earth.
One temple, Preah Khan, constructed in 1191, contained 60t of gold. Its value today would be about £2bn ($3.3bn).
But despite the city's immense wealth, trouble was brewing.
At
the same time that Angkor's temple-building programme peaked, its vital
hydraulic network was falling into disrepair - at the worst possible
moment.
The end of the medieval period saw dramatic shifts in climate across south-east Asia.
Tree
ring samples record sudden fluctuations between extreme dry and wet
conditions - and the lidar map reveals catastrophic flood damage to the
city's vital water network.
With this lifeline in tatters, Angkor entered a spiral of decline from which it never recovered.
In
the 15th Century, the Khmer kings abandoned their city and moved to the
coast. They built a new city, Phnom Penh, the present-day capital of
Cambodia.
Life in Angkor slowly ebbed away.
When Mouhot arrived he found only the great stone temples, many of them in a perilous state of disrepair.
Nearly everything else - from common houses to royal palaces, all of which were constructed of wood - had rotted away.
The vast metropolis that once surrounded the temples had been all but devoured by the jungle.
