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1B The Collap of Angkor双语新闻
An Empire’s Fall
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forgivenA Almost hidden amid the forests of northern Cambodia is the scene of one of the
greatest vanishing acts of all time. This was once the heart of the Khmer kingdom, which lasted from the 9th to the 15th centuries. At its height, the Khmer Empire dominated much of Southeast Asia, from Myanmar (Burma) in the west to Vietnam in the east. As many as 750,000 people lived in Angkor, its magnificent capital. The most extensive urban complex of the preindustrial world, Angkor stretched across an area the size of New York City. Its greatest temple, Angkor Wat, is the world's largest religious monument even today.
B Yet when the first European missionaries arrived in Angkor in the late 16th
century, they found a city that was already dying. Scholars have come up with a list of susp
ected caus for Angkor's decline. The include foreign invaders, a religious change of heart, and a shift to maritime trade. But it's mostly guesswork: Roughly 1,300 inscriptions survive on temple doors and monuments, but the people of Angkor left not a single word explaining their kingdom's collap.
C Some scholars assume that Angkor died the way it lived: by the sword. The
historical records of Ayutthaya, a neighboring state, claim that warriors from that kingdom "took" Angkor in 1431. If so, their motive is not difficult to guess. No doubt Angkor would have been a rich prize: Inscriptions boast that its temple towers were covered with gold. After its rediscovery by Western travelers just over a century ago, historians deduced from Angkor's ruins that the city had been looted by invaders from Ayutthaya.
D Roland Fletcher, co-director of a rearch effort called the Greater Angkor Project, is not convinced. Some early scholars, he says, viewed Angkor according to the sieges and conquests of European history. “The ruler of Ayutthaya, indeed, says he took Angkor, and he may have taken some formal regalia back to Ayutthaya with him,” says Fletcher. But af
ter Angkor was captured, Ayutthaya’s ruler placed his son on the throne. “He's not likely to have smashed the place up before giving it to his son.”
E A religious shift may also have contributed to the city's decline, by diminishing royal authority. Angkor was a regal-ritual city; its kings claimed to be the world emperors of Hindu mythology and erected temples to themlves. But in the 13th and 14th centuries, Theravada Buddhism gradually took over from Hinduism. Its principles of social equality may have threatened Angkor's elite. “It w as very subversive, just like Christianity was subversive to the Roman Empire," says Fletcher.
must是什么意思F The regal-ritual city operated on a moneyless economy, relying on tribute and taxation. The kingdom's main currency was rice, the staple food of the laborers who built the temples and the thousands who ran them. For one temple complex, Ta Prohm, more than 66,000 farmers produced nearly 3,000 tons of rice a year. This was then ud to feed the temple's priests, dancers, and workers. Scholars estimate that farm laborers comprid nearly half of Greater Angkor's population. A new religion that promoted ideas of social equality might have led to rebellion.
G Or maybe the royal court simply turned its back on Angkor. Angkor's rulers often erected new temple complexes and let older ones decay. This may have doomed the city when a trade began to develop between Southeast Asia and China. Maybe it was simple economic opportunism that, by the 16th century, had caud the Khmer center of power to shift: The move to a location clor to the Mekong River, near Cambodia's prent-day capital, Phnom Penh, allowed it easier access to the a.
H Economic and religious changes may have contributed to Angkor's downfall, but its rulers faced another foe. Angkor was powerful largely thanks to an advanced system of canals and rervoirs. The enabled the city to keep scarce water in dry months and disper excess water during the rainy ason. But forces beyond Angkor's control would eventually bring an end to this carefully constructed, rational system.
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I Few ancient sites in southern Asia could compare to Angkor in its ability to guarantee a steady water supply. That reliability required massive feats of engineering. The first scholar to appreciate the scale of Angkor's waterworks was French archeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier. In 1979, he argued that the greatgroot
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rervoirs, or barays, rved two purpos: to symbolize the Hindu cosmos and to irrigate the rice fields. Unfortunately, Groslier could not pursue his ideas further. Cambodia's civil war, the brutal regime of the Khmer Rouge, and the subquent arrival of Vietname forces in 1979 turned Angkor into a no-go zone for two decades.
J In the 1990s, Christophe Pottier followed up on Groslier's ideas and discovered that the south part of Angkor was a vast disperd landscape of housing, water tanks, shrines, roads and canals. Then, in 2000, Roland Fletcher and his colleague Damian Evans—as part of a collaborative study with Pottier—saw some NASA radar images of Angkor. The rearchers marveled at the sophistication of Angkor's infrastructure. "We realized that the entire landscape of Greater Angkor is artificial," Fletcher says. Teams of laborers constructed hundreds of kilometers of canals and dikes that diverted water from the rivers to the barays. Overflow channels bled off excess water that accumulated during the summer monsoon months. After the monsoon, irrigation channels disperd the stored water. "It was an incredibly clever system," says Fletcher.
