Thursday, October 7, 2021

Ultimate and Massive Urban Decay: Angkor, Cambodia (Part 1)

Ankor temples from tourismcambodia.com

Introduction

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.

As written in Wikipedia

"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:
  1. Warfare (as an example, the destruction the Inca and Aztecs)
  2. Environmental degradation and collapse (Easter Island)
  3. Political decay and inability to maintain the colossal infrastructure
  4. Disease or a pandemic
  5. 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.
 

Temple of Ta Prohm

 
Local man climbing spire at Ta Prohm
Stone columns, Ta Prohm

From Wikipedia
"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.

From Wikipedia
"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? 

To be continued.....

Appendix - Background information from BBC

Beyond Angkor: How lasers revealed a lost city

By Ben Lawrie
Documentary film-maker

  • Published
  • 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.

    Relief map of MahendraparvataLidar 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.


    Friday, October 1, 2021

    Before the Crisis: Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, in 1982

    The Texas border city of Del Rio was in the news in September of 2021 because of the thousands of Haitian refugees who were hoping to enter the United States. Del Rio is in south central Texas on the Rio Grande. Across the river in northern Coahuila estado is Ciudad Acuña. The news stories reminded me that I spent a day in Ciudad Acuña in 1982 during a long road trip to Big Bend National Park. 

    Wash day in the Rio Grande, Ciudad Acuña, Mexico (Agfapan 25 film, Leica M3)

    Looking back, it felt like a simpler and more innocent time. We had no issues crossing into Mexico and then returning to USA. No one checked the car or asked us to open the trunk. We had our passports, but I cannot recall if the agent looked at them. I was surprised that there were no fences on the US side of the river, and, at least in July of 1982, anyone could easily cross the river. Ciudad Acuña looked rather sleepy. 


    Everyone we met was very friendly. Mexican families were washing their cars in the river, and the local kids were swimming and having a great time. I did not write down the location (my photo note-keeping was haphazard in those days), but I think this was at the Braulio Fernandez Ecological Park.

    Where is the traffic? Near Alpine, Texas.

    West Texas is big, lonely, and arid. You drive for hours and hours and see cacti and dry brush. Winter might be very scenic when snow drapes the terrain. It might be a bit cold, too.

    Big Bend National Park, Texas
    In or near Big Bend National Park

    Somewhere I have more negatives or slides of west Texas. Scanning them will wait for another day. 

    I took these photographs on Agfapan 25 film with a Leica M3 camera with 50mm ƒ/2.8 Elmar lens (Mexico scenes) or a Nikon F camera. Click any photo to enlarge it. I bought the M3 the year before in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was a beater but served me for 25 years.


    Friday, September 24, 2021

    Near the Top of Asia, the Kingdom of Lo (Part 7, Heading South)

    Heading south out of Lo Manthang

    Dear readers, we have walked to the remote capital of Lo Manthang in Nepal's Kingdom of Lo and ridden horses to the monastery of Nyiphu near the Tibetan border. But autumn was approaching, and it was time to head south and, eventually, home. 

    Leaving Lo Manthang, we walked south through a rather desolate and bleak landscape. Imagine the winter here at 3,800 m elevation. For our trek south, we followed the eastern route which approximately follows the Kali Gandhi River. We crossed a couple of passes exceeding 3,900 m elevation, but it was not hard walking, and we had been at that altitude for over a week.

    Modern steel girder bridge at Charang
    Charang (Tsarang)
    Long day in the saddle, Charang

    Charang (or Tsarang), at 3550 m is the first town south of Lo Manthang. We stayed in the Kailash Hotel, a rustic but clean place. Note from the photographs above that we still had magnificent weather, with nights just a bit below freezing. It was October 14, so winter would be here soon.

    A ruined palace, once the home of the Raja of Mustang, strategically overlooks the town.


    Dhargyeling Monastery, Charang

    The Dhargyeling Monastery in Charang, possibly over 500 years old, is a treasury of statuary, painting, and sacred scrolls. How do these pigments survive the brutal cycling from cold to hot?

    Ghami

    In another day, we reached the village of Ghami, where we had stayed a week before. From here on heading south, we retraced our steps along the Kali Gandhi River. 

    Main Street, Syanboche
    Packing up at the Dhaulagiri, Syanboche

    Our next night was in Syanboche (also Syangbochen? approx. 3,800 m), really little more than a dirt street between some houses. 

    Sure-footed walking near Chungsi
    Samar
    At the Annapurna, Samar

    Samar was a rather well developed town, just a short distance above Chele and the crossing of the Kali Gandaki. North of town, the road passed through some treacherous terrain of landslides and rotten rock. We saw road crews trying to cut the road across some cliff-faces. We learned later that in the following winter, parts of the road were swept away in landslides. Our horses were more sure-footed than we were.

    The next day, we walked across the river and stayed again in the big town of Kagbeni, which I described in Pat 2 of this series (click the link).

    Jomson

    Oh, oh, traffic, electricity, stores, lights - after another day's walk south from Kagbeni, we reached Jomson, the main commercial town of southern Mustang. Jomson has many hotels as well stores, a health center, and an airport. This was a major stop on the Annapurna circuit, so it has received tourist traffic for decades.

    Jomson was the last stop for most of our group. They returned to Kathmandu by air. Within about a week, brutal cold descended into Central Asia, and many Mustang villagers had to head south abruptly. 

    I opted to continue south on foot and walk down the fantastic valley of the Kali Gandaki. The river cuts the deepest canyon in the world between the 8,000-m peaks of Dhaulagiri and Annapurna. This amazing 4-day walk carries your through several biologic zones as the elevation drops and the temperature goes up. You are in high altitude desert at Jomson and semi-tropical rainforest at Tatopani. I wrote about this canyon walk in 2017. Highly recommended!

    This ends one of my best hiking trips ever. I hope you enjoyed riding (walking) along. 

    Friday, September 17, 2021

    Near the Top of Asia, the Kingdom of Lo (Part 6, Nyiphu Monastery)

     

    Waypoints from a Garmin Geko GPS receiver. Mystique is the guesthouse in Lo-Manthang. Maps made with ESRI ArcGIS software

    North of Lo-Manthang, the terrain looks dry, wild, and forbidding. But humans have inhabited this area for at least 2500 years, indicating there was sufficient water for agriculture and animal husbandry. The cliffs around the valley are riddled with caves, some of which were used for human occupation hundreds of years ago. Many were tombs and contain religious relics dating back to the origins of Tibetan Buddhism.

     
    Chhoser is a small town in the valley north of Lo-Manthang. I think this is where we bought tickets to visit the monastery. In the photograph above, note the rock walls made of rounded river rock. I assume this is one way that the villagers cleared the land to make it suitable for some agriculture (barley?) or grazing. You see similar rock walls in New England, where settlers in the 1600s and 1700s cleared rocks from the land and used walls as a disposal method.

    The  Nyiphug Namdrol Norbuling Monastery is north of the town of Chhoser and is partly built into the mountain. We rented horses for the 8 km. trip north out of Lo-Manthang. Our Sherpa guides walked, but we wimpy lowlanders opted for the bumpy luxury transportation.

    Ancient books wrapped in silk
    Modern notebooks at a study table
    Buddha backed by a modern commercial decorative cloth (or tablecloth?)
    The rooms built into the rock are decorated like many gompas, with colorful fabrics, a sitting Buddha, candles, some electric lights, and a variety of offerings donated by pilgrims. Fascinating.

     
    Monks occupied some of these caves in solitary meditation, sometimes spending months or years alone. Other caves shielded families in the past during warfare. I am not sure how they handled water supply. Some caves contained tombs dating back thousands of years. A 2017 Public Broadcast System (PBS) NOVA program described an expedition to investigate Secrets of the Sky Tombs. We were able to climb up to some of the caves, which have passageways and platforms that are semi-safe for tourists.
     
    View from a cave above Nyiphug Gompa
    This is a very special place. And the remoteness and culture will be profoundly changed when the road is complete down the Kali Gandaki. Already, the road to China means Chinese trade goods come in from the north. What happens when mass market tourism comes via bus? As David Ways wrote in 2019:
    For trekkers the dreaded road from Pokhara to Lo Manthang to Tibet is not yet as bad as some people make out (it only exists in small sections and is completely off-road). However, once it is finished and the trading route to China is fully open there’s little doubt the Kingdom of Lo will disappear into folklore and package tours much like the Annapurna Circuit of 10 years ago.
    Returning to Lo-Manthang
    As of 2011, Lo was still a magical place, a time capsule of tradition and a way of life little changed over the decades. I am glad I visited this remote part of the world. When the COVID crisis is finally under control, consider a trip to the Kingdom of Lo. 

    These are digital images from a Panasonic G1 digital camera. This was Panasonic's first micro four thirds (µ4/3) camera and was very refined for a version 1 product.

    Saturday, September 11, 2021

    20-Year Memorial: Destruction of the World Trade Center, New York City

    Background

    Dear Readers, 20 years ago, the unthinkable happened. On September 11, 2001, foreign terrorists commandeered commercial jet airplanes and flew two of them into the World Trade Center Buildings in New York City. The first plane went into the North Tower at 08:46 am. The second plane flew into the South Tower at 09:03 am. Within an hour and 42 minutes, raging fires caused both towers to collapse into a gigantic pile of twisted steel, smoldering debris, concrete, and rubble. Several other buildings in the complex also collapsed. In total, 2,977 victims died and over 25,000 sustained injuries. At least 8,000 first responders have died since then from toxic dust at the site.

    The War on Terror

    America changed forever. We engaged in a "War on Terror," which had profound consequences on the countries involved, our adversaries, our allies, and us. In some ways, we prevailed. Jihadist organizations have not mounted a successful external terrorist act in the USA since 2001. 

    But for 20 years, officials in the US Government lied to the American public about the success or lack of success in the wars. Deceit became entrenched, an unspoken conspiracy to hide the truth. We never learned the real goals of the war, the definitions of success, or the cost. The longer the war lasted, the more its “grotesque subtext” of nativism and racism moved to the foreground of American politics (Spencer Ackerman, 2021. Reign of terror, How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, Viking Press). Thom Hartmann observed, "Bush’s presidency had devastating consequences to America in terms of international credibility, faith in our government domestically, the waste of trillions of dollars in tax cuts, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of human lives in unnecessary wars."

    Many of the divisions, hatreds, suspicions, intolerance, and viciousness that we see today in our domestic politics stem from those two decades of warfare. In a long article by The Washington Post by Carlos Lozada titled, "9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed," Lozada points out,

    Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness. This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades — the works of investigation, memoir and narrative by journalists and former officials that have charted the path to that day, revealed the heroism and confusion of the early response, chronicled the battles in and about Afghanistan and Iraq, and uncovered the excesses of the war on terror.

    America was indeed knocked off balance. As William Galston wrote in American Purpose, the fact that the USA is now "weaker, more divided, and less respected than it was two decades ago" was due to our own choices, not prescience by Osama bin Laden or other jihadist theorists. 

    • Now we have renewed domestic right-wing terrorism here at home, although the state's security apparatus may be able to keep it under control (or will it?). 
    • We lie to and deceive ourselves, and we have the Covid pandemic running rampant, with anti-vaxxers engaged in a death cult. 
    • The 9/11 terrorists did not manage to fly a plane into the Capitol, but American traitors attacked it on January 6, 2021. 
    • We invaded Iraq to dispose an autocrat, but several contenders here in USA are trying to impose autocracy on the USA. 
    • We tried to teach Iraqis and Afghans to hold free and fair elections, but in many US states, Republicans have undermined voting access for minority citizens, gerrymandered voting districts, and corrupted the vote certification mechanisms.
    • The forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan soured the world's opinion of democracies as agents of development and good. 
    • The endless wars led to today's revisionism and inward-thinking.

    Civil war has come to the USA, and we did it to ourselves. 

    How will history books a century from now describe the war and its consequences? Who will write these history books? What mythology will those writers try to relate to their readers? 

    Will schools honestly relate the story, or will they be muzzled as per the racist restrictions on "critical race theory" and the banning of books?

    Some Photographs


    World Trade Center, May 30, 1997 

    This is the view of the WTC from the rooftop of 270 Broadway. I attended a meeting in that building on the top floor, and the view was too good to resist. This is a vertical panorama using an Olympus Zuiko 35mm ƒ/2.8 shift lens, with one frame shifted fully down and the second frame shifted up. I joined the frame with Photoshop's >Automate>Photomerge function. It is amazingly effective. Click to see the panorama at 3000 pixels

    South Manhattan panorama from 270 Broadway, May 30, 1997

    This is a horizontal panorama from the roof of 270 Broadway. My lens was not wide enough to include the top of the World Trade Center towers. Click to see 5000 pixels wide.

    West panorama from 138 Lafayette Street, New York, Dec. 9, 1994

    I took this panorama from the rooftop of the old Holiday Inn at 138 Lafayette Street. Back in the mid-1990s, this was one of the few hotels in lower Manhattan. Now there are dozens of trendy hotels. The Holiday Inn was a bit grungy, but it was convenient to the Federal Center, where I had business. The smog is over New Jersey.

    New York view south from roof of 138 Lafayette Street (Leica IIIC, 5cm ƒ/3.5 Elmar lens, Kodak Tri-X film)

    This is another view south from the roof of the Holiday Inn at 138 Lafayette Street. The tall building in left center is the Jacob Javits Federal Center. Click to see the photograph expanded.

    Manhattan view north from the South Tower of the World Trade Center, April 29, 2001. Panorama consists of four frames from a Rolleiflex 3.5F camera with 75mm ƒ/3.5 Xenotar lens. The north tower is on the left of the scene. Click the photograph to see the full-size image.

    Notes from the 10-Year Anniversary

    I wrote about the World trade Centers on the 10-year anniversary. Please refer to these earlier articles:

    The early years before 2011:

    https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2011/08/before-and-after-new-york-and-world.html

    The later years and destruction:

     https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2011/09/new-york-and-world-trade-center-later.html

    Thank you for reading. I hope I can write an article in 2031 at the 30-year anniversary. Will we still be the USA then?