3/6/2023 0 Comments Angkor wat summer islandsScholars have come up with a long list of suspected causes, including rapacious invaders, a religious change of heart, and a shift to maritime trade that condemned an inland city. By the late 16th century, when Portuguese missionaries came upon the lotus-shaped towers of Angkor Wat-the most elaborate of the city's temples and the world's largest religious monument-the once resplendent capital of the empire was in its death throes. As many as 750,000 people lived in Angkor, its capital, which sprawled across an area the size of New York City's five boroughs, making it the most extensive urban complex of the preindustrial world. The Khmer kingdom lasted from the ninth to the 15th centuries, and at its height dominated a wide swath of Southeast Asia, from Myanmar (Burma) in the west to Vietnam in the east. The temple has disappeared into the forest.Īngkor is the scene of one of the greatest vanishing acts of all time. After we pass, I crane my neck for a last look. Banteay Samre is just one of more than a thousand shrines the Khmer erected in the city of Angkor during a building spree whose scale and ambition rivals the pyramids of Egypt. ![]() These may once have been surrounded by a moat symbolizing the oceans encircling Mount Meru, mythical home of Hindu gods. The temple is cloistered inside two sets of concentric square walls. Restored in the 1940s, the 12th-century Banteay Samre, devoted to the Hindu god Vishnu, recalls the medieval Khmer Empire at its height. Then, as Donald Cooney guides the ultralight plane over the treetops, the magnificent temple comes into view. Clusters of Khmer homes, perched on spindly stilts to cope with flooding during the summer monsoon, dot the landscape from the Tonle Sap, the "great lake" of Southeast Asia, some 20 miles to the south, to the Kulen Hills, a ridge jutting from the floodplain a roughly equal distance to the north. Beneath us sprawls the lost city of Angkor, now in ruins and populated mostly by peasant rice farmers. At first it is no more than an umber smudge in the forest canopy of northern Cambodia. This story appears in the July 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine.įrom the air, the centuries-old temple appears and vanishes like a hallucination.
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