海角大神

Researchers have clarified that Cambodia鈥檚 鈥渓ost city,鈥� found in the swelter of the country鈥檚 northwestern jungles, was not so lost at all.听It is, however, bigger than once thought, prompting scientists to revise their previous beliefs about the聽character 鈥� and the eventual collapse 鈥撀爋f the Khmer Empire.

Researchers from the University of Sydney's archaeological research center in Cambodia said that they had known about Mahendraparvata 鈥� an ancient city from the Khmer Empire some 1,200 years old 鈥� for decades, but that before the use of Lidar technology, which allowed them to probe the vast undergrowth with lasers that revealed the buried city鈥檚 shape, they had not understood just how extensive the abandoned one-time seat of the Khmer kingdom was. The city had previously as 鈥渄iscovered" in a "world exclusive" from The Sydney Morning Herald.

鈥淚t is an exaggeration to say a lost city has been found because if you鈥檙e working in Cambodia you know it鈥檚 been there since the 1900s,"聽Jean-Baptiste Chevance, director of the Archaeology and Development Foundation and the project鈥檚 lead archaeologist, told . "The main discovery is a whole network of roads and dykes that were linking monuments that were already known."

The city's unexpected size suggests that the Khmer聽Empire, which ruled Southeast Asia from聽about 800 A.D. to 1400 A.D.,聽was more urban than previously imagined: Mahendraparvata was a planned, well-laid-out city that was formerly linked with a system of roads and canals to the Angkor Wat temples, built some 350 years later also in Siem Reap province. Scientists had previously thought that the kingdom was more a loosely organized collection of population centers. The findings are due to be published in the聽.

"We identify聽an entire, previously undocumented, formally planned urban landscape into which the major temples such as Angkor Wat were integrated," the researchers 聽published by NBC.

The researchers also offered additional comment on why it was that the Khmer Empire, once decadent in its stone temples ascending toward the clouds, collapsed into ruin, not to be reincorporated into the country鈥檚 story again until the French reintroduced the memory to Cambodian national identity. Now, researchers have suggested that periods of megadrought, combined with practices that caused environmental degradation, were to blame for the fall of the empire 鈥� a recipe聽thought to have led to the decline of massive, ancient civilizations elsewhere in the world.

鈥淭he lidar data reveal anthropogenic changes to the landscape on a vast scale, and lend further weight to an emerging consensus that infrastructural complexity, unsustainable modes of subsistence and climate variation were crucial factors in the decline of the classical Khmer civilization,鈥澛�.听

Once abandoned to time, the royal city was worked to rubble as a millennium of industrious vegetation and monsoon rains did their worst on its stone temples. The mountain, Phnom Kulen,聽which once observed Cambodia at a cultural peak, would go on to witness one of the country's worst moments, becoming a Khmer Rouge stronghold in the 1970s, when the government murdered about a fifth of its population.

Throughout all that, the mountain has remained a spiritual place, host to tens of thousands of pilgrims each year.