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January 8, 2014

The Collapse of the Khmer Empire

An Excerpt from "The Watchman's Rattle"

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Recently, archeologists have begun piecing together the demise of the great thirteenth-century Khmer Empire, located deep in the jungles of what is now Cambodia. Known for the world's largest religious temple at the time, Angkor Wat, the Khmer Empire stretched over four hundred square miles and served almost a million citizens. According to author and scholar Richard Stone, Angkor represented "the most extensive urban complex of the pre-industrial world."

But today, scholars describe the collapse of Angkor society as "a cautionary tale of technological overreach." According to new archaeological findings, "Angkor was doomed by the very ingenuity that transformed a collection of minor fiefdoms into an empire.

New archeological evidence reveals that the Khmer Empire achieved unfathomable feats in hydraulic engineering: "Khmer engineers built a network of canals, moats, ponds and reservoirs… including a reservoir called the West Baray that's five miles long and 1.5 miles wide. To build this third and most sophisticated of Angkor's large reservoirs a thousand years ago, as many as 200,000 Khmer workers may have been needed to pile nearly 16 million cubic yards of soil in embankments 300 feet wide and three stories tall."

Today, scientists marvel at the complex network of spillways, moats, canals, reservoirs, ponds, and warning systems conceived and built by hand by Khmer engineers. There is little debate that this hydraulic technology was the basis for the success of the Empire itself.

Reliable water meant a reliable harvest, which enabled steady food supplies to be available year-round. Once food and water could be stored in surplus, the empire quickly expanded.

Then, after six centuries of successful water management, two catastrophic events occurred — one man-made and the other orchestrated by nature.

According to Dr. Roland Fletcher, archeologist at the University of Sydney and codirector of the Greater Angkor Project, the cascade first began with a tragic engineering mistake.

Evidence indicates that engineers decided to change the course of the Siem Reap River by constructing a dam. The goal of the dam was to direct river water toward a newly built reservoir. But the engineers miscalculated and built the dam too low. So when the monsoons arrived the dam turned into a massive spillway. Water began flowing over the top of the dam into abandoned canals, causing catastrophic damage to other parts of the system. Once the dam was fully breached and the damage had spread, the amount of water directed to other reservoirs also decreased.

Records show that the Khmer spent generations attempting to repair the damaged water system "that grew ever more complex and unruly." Yet year after year, the system on which the survival of the empire depended continued to deteriorate until the dam completely failed, igniting a cataclysmic chain reaction of other failures.

Then the second event struck: A series of back-to-back droughts and mega monsoons descended on the Khmer Empire between 1362 and 1392 and again between 1415 and 1440. According to Fletcher, these extreme conditions (caused by what scientists call the "Little Ice Age") "would have ruined the water system."

Similar to the fate of the Mayans, water problem bred food shortages and disease and contributed to a malnourished Khmer army who became unable to fend off attack.

Regardless of which final act led to the collapse of the Khmer, it is likely they would have continued to advance if the complexity of the engineering and environmental problems they faced had not paved the way for supernatural beliefs to intrude. As conditions worsened, the Khmer, like the Mayans, began putting all their faith in fetishism and sacrifices were stepped up. And once beliefs were substituted for fact, ration solutions became expendable. 

This excerpt is from Rebecca's book, The Watchman's Rattle - for more information, click here






 
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