[HN Gopher] How Early Megacities Emerged from the Jungles of Cam...
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How Early Megacities Emerged from the Jungles of Cambodia
Author : pseudolus
Score : 91 points
Date : 2021-02-13 10:28 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| latchkey wrote:
| I went to Angkor Wat. It is beautiful.
|
| I also rented a motorbike and used Google Maps to locate other
| far less popular ruins. There is a ton of them that are easily
| located from the imagery.
|
| It was a really fun set of adventures of driving a dumpy
| motorbike, by myself, down dirt roads in the middle of nowhere.
| Coming across ruins that no other tourists find.
|
| I really miss travel...
| psychstudio wrote:
| My partner and I did the same thing 10 years ago on $1 per day
| bicycles. There are numerous large and impressive ruins
| scattered all over Siem Reap and you get then all to yourself.
|
| I really miss travel too.
| latchkey wrote:
| If you ever head back, check out 'Koh Andet Eco Resort'
|
| After the Angkor Wat trip, I moved to Vietnam and then bought
| a motorbike and drove across the border, all over Cambodia. I
| found that resort also by zooming in on areas of google maps.
|
| The whole resort is floating off a small island in the middle
| of a river. It is amazing.
| avighnay wrote:
| Angkor Wat was and is a prime example of human civilization and
| its early prowess. However, the title is not entirely right. The
| Angkor Wat by itself was built by Suryavarman who was apparently
| a descendant of the Cholas of Tamilnadu, India. The Cholas and
| Pandyas are very under documented empires.
|
| https://www.britannica.com/biography/Suryavarman-II
|
| There are tamil inscriptions in Angor Wat and the architecture is
| highly influenced by Chola/Pandya architecture.
|
| https://www.quora.com/How-did-Tamil-Kingdoms-influence-Angko...
|
| Some examples of what the Cholas and Pandyas accomplished which
| stands to today are
|
| Tanjore Temple (Cholas)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX9-__GWHnA (Edit: Unfortunately,
| this video also has a lot of old western cliched ideas of
| Hinduism, hope I had a better documentary to share...) (for
| scale, this can fit 200 Taj Mahals)
|
| Madurai Meenakshi (Pandyas)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQjI3DPt9Tk
|
| You can see that the architectural pattern of 4 directional
| gateways with a central temple complex is basically the same as
| Angor Wat.
| BugsBunny1991 wrote:
| There doesn't seem to be anything apparent about Suryavarman's
| origins, at least according to what I've read from Cambodian
| scholars.
| tacomonstrous wrote:
| >The Angkor Wat by itself was built by Suryavarman who was
| apparently a descendant of the Cholas of Tamilnadu, India.
|
| I don't think there is any evidence to suggest that the Khmer
| dynasty was ethnically South Asian. Do you have a reference for
| this?
| rusticpenn wrote:
| It is very interesting because Suryavarman is a very common
| Tamil name, Surya means Sun. All his ancestors names are also
| typical Tamil names and are very similar to names of Chola
| kings at that time.
| bbggyy wrote:
| Cuomo and Newsom deserve the death penalty.
| adolph wrote:
| So the suburbs were first, who'd a thunk it?
|
| _The cities that arose out of the long history of tropical
| agriculture weren't high-density clusters of stone buildings
| ringed by farms like many ancient cities. Instead, they were low-
| density sprawl that incorporated large swatches of farmland into
| the urban fabric. Homes and public dwellings were made from earth
| and perishable plant materials. Though impressive, these urban
| features quickly returned to wilderness after people had
| abandoned them._
| danans wrote:
| > So the suburbs were first, who'd a thunk it?
|
| They weren't first. Low density agricultural settlements are
| not suburbs, which are by definition an extension of the
| _urban_ area, populated primarily by people not engaged in the
| agricultural economy, but rather the industrial economy.
|
| To this day, suburbs are frequently built on top what were
| previously agricultural settlements, with somewhat similar
| densities but completely different functions.
|
| Agricultural villages were first, not suburbs.
| chewz wrote:
| In Bagan on 45 sq km a thousand of temples made of brick still
| stand while houses and palaces left no trace...
|
| Also big cities in Central Asia like Merv had farms intra muros
| to shelter them from encroaching desert.
|
| This is so different from what we imaginecas a city model...
| sradman wrote:
| This Atlas Obscura article asks:
|
| > How did this medieval civilization thrive in an environment
| that would be challenging for us even today?
|
| Speaking of the 9th-15th century Khmer Empire [1] in Southeast
| Asia.
|
| > The answer, say archaeologists, is not that the Khmer were
| somehow ahead of their time... Instead, it was because Khmer
| urbanites came from a tradition of tropical city-building that
| looks very different from what we see in the more northerly
| regions of the Levant and Europe. For nearly 45,000 years, the
| Khmer's ancestors were perfecting the techniques required to
| build and farm in the jungle, manipulating earth and water to
| make empires whose remains often melted back into nature, leaving
| very little trace.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Empire
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(page generated 2021-02-13 23:01 UTC)