Historically High - The Khmer Empire

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

This week on Historically High, we journey into the heart of ancient—and present-day—Cambodia to chart the epic rise and fall of the Khmer Empire. While Europe was just beginning to stumble into the Renaissance, Angkor had already perfected the largest pre-industrial city on the planet. From the uncomfortably massive Tonlé Sap lake to the awe-inspiring stone skyline, wonder at the jaw-dropping architecture of complexes like Angkor Wat and the Bayon. Plus, we unravel the empire’s true engine of power: an unparalleled network of reservoirs (barays), canals, and hydrological engineering that tamed the monsoon and fed millions. So how did a mega-city built to control the elements suddenly vanish back into the jungle? Let’s get into it. Thanks for listening and don’t forget to hit subscribe, leave a 5-star rating and write a review. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join us at Patreon.com/HistoricallyHigh and get enrolled for some fun extra content Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey, Adam, you ready to go back to the South Pacific? I'm really excited to go back to the South Pacific. I have a lot of bones to pick with high school teachers yet again. Usually, when we've been in the area of the South Pacific, we're either talking about World War II, or we're talking about white people fucking around, taking a bunch of stuff, spices, things like that. But we get to actually talk about some natives in the

neighborhood. We haven't been to Cambodia. I don't have we done anything Cambodia related. I can't think of much because I don't even know. I think VOC was more like Sri Lanka in the Indies. And Java. Yeah, instead of going up into

Cambodia. So this is the first time we're going to touch Cambodia. Cambodia is... Isn't it's Cambodia fun. Cambodia is just Cambodia. It's fun. It's a shockingly beautiful place. It is, I I showed my wife a picture of it, and she goes, that's real.

Yeah. I was like, yeah, that's real. And a lot of you have seen Cambodian ruins. If you've seen the OG Tomb Raider with Angelina Jolie back before we found out, you know, all the craziness, ha-ha. That's almost fun. Yes. They're the ruins that have like the banyan trees, right? Yep.

The banyan trees that are like growing over and it looks like holding the stone, almost like it's like natural. I meant like they meant to have it like that. But these are ruins that are part of this Khmer Empire that ruled Cambodia and a large portion of these other countries for what, like 400 years. That's six. But leaving behind these ruins like Encore Watt, also the city of Ancourt, they're gorgeous. They're so, and they're so, what am I trying to say? Like unique. They're planned.

They're well thought out. And then they have a kind of flare in a spice that during this time we're going to be talking about this is the medieval times. Yeah. The Renaissance is literally starting in England. And this is going on here. And I like this is a place. Cambodia is a place where you get this. All of it makes sense how this empire acts.

actually rises and falls. It's so easy to follow it, but what happens in between its rise and its fall is just cool shit that they're building these things that are now UNESCO, you know, Heritage World Heritage sites,

and they get millions of visitors every year. And again, that most people, if they took a look at it or they, you know, picture a ruin, a jungle ruin in your head, this is exactly what you would picture. And it's so fucking cool. It's also a stark contrast to anything that we've talked about in Europe around this time

because these are Eastern religions. This is we're dealing with Hinduism and Buddhism kind of is the two main branches here. And so the, I guess maybe it's because they are polytheistic and there's more gods that they can pray to. This isn't like the Crusades where it's for God and glory and taking back the homeland. God will it! This is like... These are Indian religions that have been transported into Southeast Asia. And while still feeling very new in the regions that they're taking over,

these are very old religions that date back a really, really long time with established mythology and lore. Some of the Hindu stuff feels very Greek, so I would be very curious to go back and kind of do like a time comparison. because we have a mountain that has the Hindu gods on it, very much like Mount Olympus.

I'm trying to remember what episode we talked about it in, but there was a episode it was about certain, maybe it might have been immortality. And we were talking about the myths of something that was in China

and it talked about like the sea of milk or something like that. And I can't remember exactly what, or maybe that was like, what was it, Harris's breast milk? that was sprayed up into the sky and created like constantly like the Milky Way. But the areas that they're going to find

you know eventually these ruins and everything, these things are basically just like what am I trying to say? Like libraries with no books in them. The walls are the library. Like it tells the intricacy of the carvings and the amount of them are, it kind of like makes you think

did they build this just to be able to like have a canvas for this stuff? Yeah. They needed a bunch of blank walls to do shit on. So they made the blank walls as cool as could be before they started carving them. What we need is we need this to look so fucking cool that from a distance, you see, you know, like, I got to get closer. And then when you get there, now we tell you the story. And a lot of these histories are victim to, I would almost say victim to their climates.

Because whereas you have papyrus scrolls in different areas that are kind of more dry, we're going to have a lot more back. a lot more history back then than just carvings and reliefs. When you're talking about Southeast Asia and just specifically the Khmer Empire, so much of this was written on palm leaves. And if it wasn't copied down 100 years later, these palm leaves were just going to disintegrate because of the climate that they're in. So we have to rely on a lot of sources outside of the Khmer Empire, just their dealings back and forth with these places in China coming down with envoys.

and then we have, like you're saying, just walls. Yeah. Walls that we have to translate. Yeah, because they lasted because this isn't a place that's like, hey, we have a spring, a summer, a fall, a winter. This is like, hey, this is wet season when we get our monsoons. And then this is dry season. Before we get too far into it, remember, patreon.com slash historically high. Go get the bonus content.

five-star ratings. We love seeing them. That number keeps climbing. Reviews have been excellent. Chris and I just put out fairly recently two teaching episodes, both that I think we were excitedly nervous to see the receptions to. And the reviews and comments that we've gotten about them have just been, it's super. It's fun. It's fun to see a grouping of people that latch on to something that you really enjoy.

Keep subscribing. We're very, very close to 30,000 subscribers on Spotify, which is, it's just cool. It's just, it's a fun thing to say. 30,000 of you guys are subscribing to listen. It's like perfect game. Yeah. All right. Is it time to go into the Khmer?

The what? I was about to say the Khmer Rouge, but we'll talk about how that comes about later. Exactly. This is just going to be the normal Khmer Empire. So the Khmerian Empire is, again, centered in modern day Cambodia. It lasted from the official start time, more start date, was 802 in the common era, up to what, like 1431, I think, right? So it had a, like you said, little over 600 years. Which is a hell of a run for an empire.

It's a long time. in the sense of like what China's going through with dynasties and things like that, they're just again in Southeast China, which means that when China wants to expand, they're eventually going to come down and conquer you. They're going to eventually stop looking for trading partners and start looking for vassal states. For them to be able to hold off for so long, and the Khmer Empire that we're going to be talking about is born out of kind of this

loose collection of I guess you could call them city states maybe principalities is probably a better term. Territory like yeah whatever yeah and these were formerly kind of this grouping of this Khmer empire before you start seeing these other countries these other

empires come in kind of in the general area just around Cambodia what they're dealing with is the serivaya and the Selendia which was the Sumatran in the Java, Javanese dynasties, that are these strong maritime powers that held so much power over this Malay Peninsula and then southern Cambodia, because those were the solid mainlands that they were going to go into.

So you have the control out on the water from them. You also have the Kingdom of Champa, which is situated kind of along the central and southern coasts of what's modern day Vietnam now. major, major rival for the Khmeras that we're going to be talking about during this episode. You have the Devarty, which were to the west of kind of present-day Thailand. Then you had the divet. And this was northern Vietnam. They had just broken free of the Tang Dynasty in China like you were talking about. The crazy thing about this is the divet and DeChampa that share Vietnam now are broken pretty

close to that line that we were fighting over in Vietnam. So, like the... It's an ancestral like heritage type of. Yeah. It's an area that has been in shifting power sources that communism was coming for

for a thousand years. Just so, so long that these two warring parts of Vietnam were at each other's throats. There was a ruler that comes along named Jaya Varmann, he was somewhat of, I think from kind of what I saw, and maybe you saw something

similar or different. He was almost like a child of diplomats that had spent time abroad. Is that kind of the reading that you got on it? Yeah. So what, I guess what ends up happening is a little bit before Jai Varmine, and a lot of these names are going to sound very similar because I can't remember what the entomology or how they broke it up was, but Varmine is like. a title that almost just goes along, you just get the first part of it.

And then Varmann is what goes on the end of it. It's, Varmine is essentially, I believe it translates over into like God's shield. It's shield. And so people just kept taking something and then shield. Holy shield. People's shield or whatever was, like Eagle Shield. Like, it was just a contest to see who could come up with the coolest thing. Before the Empire kind of is actually born,

the Khmer people actually belong to these two states, like the two main states. I think one of them was, I believe it was Phenon that was located on the Mekong Delta. And from like a geographical standpoint, Cambodia, there are so many rivers that come off of the Himalayas that are these major, major rivers in the world. And the Mekong is actually one of those rivers that comes from the Himalayas. And it almost splits Cambodia right down the middle. 12th largest river in the world I want to say it runs through China, Vietnam, Cambodia

The Delta is in Vietnam, right? Because remember you always hear in Vietnam we're going at the goddamn Mekong Delta So With that going right through The heart of Cambodia That also allows for like a ton of trade And all that kind of stuff

So you have almost an inland people And then you have people that are What you would consider closer to the rivers Seafarers and river fareers? I mean, you don't even have the seafarers because you don't have all the area around you is from somebody else. So, like, Cambodia is kind of almost locked a little bit as far as, like, landlocked, just in the sense that Vietnam is on that one side, keeping them away from the ocean. Then they have, I think, Thailand. Is it Thailand on the other side?

I believe so. They keeps them away on the other side. So they're a river people, and that's going to influence, like, how they do warfare and all. of that. The second type of people is the Chenla. And so the Fudan word located along the Mekong Delta, they were the maritime trading states. They were the first ones or one of the first ones to kind of absorb the Indian political philosophy. They had the Sanskrit because that was also something that was being used, Hinduism or Hinduism and Buddhism, basically just from all the trade with India. The Chenla were inland, and so rather than being a more unified nation, they were that

loose confederation that you were talking about of like the competing principalities or states or whatever it was. Now, that had basically resolved itself eventually into like two main competitors, which was the water chenla they said, which were the coastal ones, and then the land chenla, which was, were the more inland ones. So during the late 8th century, these raiders that were on the rivers or on the seas, basically formed this thing called the Shalindra dynasty. It was based in Java, which is modern-day Indonesia, and they end up invading the, like, kind of fractured water Chenla. The southern Chenla. Correct. The ones that were more, like, weren't, like, really unified.

It was the inland ones that were more unified. So they basically execute, like, a bunch of local lords, they take control of the region. And a lot of people that were nobles in that area because they needed those people to still run the land and pay them taxes and everything, they basically turned them into political prisoners to ensure their compliance. Jaya Varmin was actually one of those captured nobles. I could see the captured nobles. And maybe I'm just thinking it maybe it's just different in the East.

but this is almost a little bit like Caesar traveling down to uh shit wherever he was going to travel to when he gets taken by the pirates to go learn in another country yeah because he's able to return yeah back yeah

his return is I would say that it's a master class in how to take over an area I mean he raises an army this army begins to conquer territories moving up the Mekong River from southeast Cambodia up into the northwest. The principalities that he couldn't conquer, he needed to get them to recognize him. So in order to do that when you have this Indianization of the area of Southeast Asia, it's not just the political, or it's not just the religions that comes over.

It's not just, you know, the culture. It's the same caste system that's in India as well. So you're going to have a hierarchy where you're going to have Hindu Brahmin that are kind of sitting at the top of the hierarchy because Hinduism was more of a bourgeoisie type religion. And you're going to have a higher concentration of Buddhists down into more of the peasant classes. Gotcha. So the proletariat. Yeah. So if you can get a hold of the...

Wait, so fuck, I don't want to make a generalization, but is... We make plenty on this. Fuck, let's go. Knock yourself out. No, I know. This is a pre-warning. I just, I'd like to... Oh, before you get that pre-warning out, this is the first episode of the new bubbler.

And so we're kind of testing out the... It hits hard. Yeah, the rips per minute type. So is Buddhism? Is Hinduism just fancy upscale Buddhism? Or am I reversing that? I think Buddhism is a far more peaceful religion. I think they're a lot more laid back because you have the Buddha

who seems like more of a chill guy than the Vishnu that has six arms. Correct. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, it's the bourgeoisie are always going to make the proletariat fight for them. So you would think that the proletariat would be less inclined to fighting because they don't want to do it.

But in order to get a hold of these upper casts, what Jaya Varman does is he travels to, Mount Mahinda Pavarada, which is known as now as Nam Kulen, and he takes a Hindu Brahmin with him. And they perform this sacred rights ceremony that makes him a Davaraja. All this guy does, and I'm not, this is not me poo-pooing on their founder myths or anything like that. But when you, if you were to just see, I sometimes see this through a cinematic lens where I see this as a movie. and so then I look at it and I say well like what's he doing

what he's doing is he's like okay I'm trying to kind of unite all these people I came back from being a political prisoner to the you know whatever it wasn't Java so now I'm getting all these people together but some of them won't listen to me because they're not viewing me in the way that their system puts me in the right light

I guess I'm not at the right level for them to listen to me so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take a guy with me. I'm going to hike up to this sacred mountain and I'm going to perform this ritual which turns me into the it was like you said it was the Devaraja but it was also the Shakravartan

or universal ruler and leader of the Devaraja cult which was the God king. So because I'm doing this ritual somehow it works because word gets around that someone has done the god king ritual and so when they're going around to these other kingdoms and everything like that they're like have you heard this guy did the god king ritual

and the guy's like no what they're like yeah someone went up to the mountain and did the god king ritual he's like well like any of us could have done that like he went and did it so he was the one that did it he must be the guy and they're like well fuck It's a pretty good point Hold on He was the first guy that really thought of this That's what I'm fucking saying

And then guess what Just right there for everybody else Enough of the people All you gotta do is have enough to make You know to get the others on your side Right All he has to do is have a few of them Gollable enough to be like

Oh shit I mean he wouldn't have been able to do that Had he not been the guy to do it right Yeah the Hindu Brahmin wouldn't have Unless he saw that he was worthy Oh fucking course he wouldn't have So he's got to do that he's got be legit. So now this guy

has established himself, not only himself, but then, of course, his line, his lineage going forward. You guys are all going to be under a god king. Yeah. He does the next logical thing for a king. He establishes this capital city at

Hari Harihara Leia. And then from there, he goes on to unite maybe anybody that's still kind of maybe questionable through these very strategic marriages and these diplomatic ties by 802 C.E. Well, yeah, God still has pieces to move on the chessboard.

Yeah, he's, just in case they're not all in on the Davaraja deal, we've got to try to work our way in. When divine power fails, make it marriage a lies and, you know, pussy's always good. That currency spends in any culture at any point in time. Recession proof. Yes. So as he's collecting this area. That was a compliment to any of our female listeners as well.

Absolutely. You should know your power. Yep. and know that we know your power as well, and that we're at the whims of your power. So he solidifies the cult control of the region. He establishes more capitals that double is these economic centers in the region. And he would end up reigning over this Khmer Empire

until 850 was the number that I got. Now, everything that we just pulled for the original Davaraja, J. Avaraja, the second. first very strategic thing that he does before the breakup into these principalities the last king that they had the last king of the Chenla I believe was Jaya Varmin

the first so you're continuing that line was something that somebody already knows about yeah it was when like the when the name Kennedy used to actually mean something that's kind of what it was right yeah yeah now it's just a bad punch line but yeah so as he's collecting these

all this history that we just talked about comes from this one carving that they found like 200 years later. So the whole origin story of the Khmer Empire comes from one inscription that was written 200 years afterwards. When we start discussing the size of these like sites and all the carvings, it's going to make sense because what we just described was a pretty intensive, long story. There's going to be room for it and oh, so much more. And it's the fact that we're going into the richest empire during this period, during the medieval period. And that's the origin story.

We have one inscription for the origin story of one of the greatest empires ever. Yeah. That's nuts. That's just that explains to you. That's why, like, you know, you know, of course, you're never going to learn a lesson from these. but this just shows you how advanced an empire can get very, very quickly, but how it can get snuffed out very, very quickly. Without a lot of, without a lot of rhyme or reason.

It doesn't matter where these empires happen. They fall because of really a lot of the same reasons. So this is like the fall of an empire is pretty much universal. And when we talk about the reasons why the Khmerer Empire falls, you're like, oh, yeah, that sounds like a lot of these other empire episodes. that you were talking about. So one of the reason he ends up moving his, like the capital city down to

Hari, God, you please say it. Hari Haralea. Hari Harlea. It's also chosen because of its proximity to the Tonal Sap Lake, which is the largest lake in Cambodia, correct? Tonle sap is, it's big and little all at the same time.

It depends on the time of year. So it has this proximity to the lake because he understands that the only way that your population grows is if you have a food source that can support the population. That's going to come in in such an enormous

that's like their bread and butter when it comes to this. And so he ends up kind of using the rest of his reign that 48 years the Jayavarman number two reigns. He ends up securing the borders for the empire,

training a professional standing army, and then also basically integrating all of those people that he had to bring in through alliances and stuff like that into more of like a centralized bureaucracy where he's able to basically keep an eye on everything have the day-to-day shit run so he can ride around on his fucking armored elephant with the gold sword and all that stuff

that's true shit that happened that might be the one reason that I'm very angry that history teachers didn't teach us about this is because at the same time that we're talking about knights on horseback in Europe, these guys are fighting on war elephants. I know. How much cooler of a story... Oh, you're on a horse.

Cool! And it's got, oh, yeah, some of these things would have like blades strapped to their tusks. Listen, this was horrible abuse for the elephants. But, come on, war elephants. This just meant that elephants could fight back against the people that were harassing them. But like they would put platforms on the back of these things and have like spearmen and archers and all this shit. And it's, if you fall off of a horse, probably not fun in armor. There is a reason.

There is a direct inspiration that Mr. Tolkien himself got for the marma killer, whatever they were called the elephants that were in Lord of the Rings. And it was this stuff. Setting up all of these centers, too, and these economic centers and making sure that all that happens, the tax system is such an interesting thing to go in to because they didn't have any money, they didn't have any coins.

These were just families that were of a higher caste in those areas that would kind of become like these provincial landholders or chieftains, and their favor that they would gain, would be solely dependent on the amount of taxes that they could give the church, which was the state at that point in time. Right. So you have these competing kind of landholder or chieftains

that are trying to gain favor with Jaya Varmin the second by saying, hey, we produced X amount of this. That's more than we produced last year, and that's more than this capital, this capital, and all of this money is flowing into these capitals. It's being paid out in taxes to the state or to the state, to the religion, and then you start to see the change of like, hey, we have more money in the system in this area. Let's build some cooler temples there.

Let's start making these areas different by adorning them with all of these different temples to the different gods. And that way, it's like a physical representation that this area is better than this area because they have more money spent in there. their capital city basically. They were trying to flex. Temple flex. Also, that competition just breeds more competition. And everybody benefits except for all of the people that are the slave labor

that are being forced to do that. You mean that are being forced to not question the God king when he says build my temple? Yeah. After he ends up passing away, you have Jaya Verman the third who takes over. He reigns for 27 years. and was succeeded by Indra Varmann the First.

So we finally get a first in this tale. Indra Varmine the First builds this first. It's called the Great Barre. And it's this giant reservoir. Raspberry Barre. Yeah, it's by way these irrigation networks that connected it to this Tonle-Sap Lake. And when we're talking about these barres, this is going to be something where I got a,

put mental pins in to show these pictures because I think you and I were both kind of taken aback by the size of these Barre Reservoirs that we're going to be talking about. Yeah. Okay, here's what's tricky about this episode is there's going to be so much stop and start from a chronological standpoint. And I don't know exactly when they built these things

as far as like the berets and everything. But to get a sense of how this empire was so successful, I just, I'm just gonna knock it out right now. So with the river that runs through the Tonal Sap Lake, the reason that he put that close is because of in the wet season, when the monsoons would come and flood the river and everything like that, the way that the region is set up, this is so weird to say,

there's like a backflow. So it's very flat to where the grade of the water, you know, gravity pulling it down is not steep. It's not like a mountain stream. It's not like that where it goes down at a severe angle. It's so What am I trying to say subtle that when

Monsoon season Not monsoon season happens You get the tonal river Which flows into Is a branch off of and flows into The Mekong correct The way that I understood it And kind of looked at it from the pictures

Is the Mekong runs down The Tone-Lay-Sap River Is a tributary into the Mekong But it's being fed from the Tonle-Sap Lake during the dry season. Correct. So usually water flows into a larger river which in turn makes it larger.

That's the whole point. So with this, the water during the monsoon season because it floods the Mekong so much, it actually back flows back up the tonal sap and floods tonal sap lake.

And it what's it's ten times its size? So it goes from basically the lake being an average of like one meter deep to 10 meters deep. So from three feet to 30 feet deep during nine months of the eight or nine months of the year? The dry season they said runs eight or nine months of the year. So for eight or nine months of the year, as Chris is talking about, the depth of the lake is only about one meter. A three foot deep lake seems like of real waste. Yeah.

And it's still pretty spread out because again, the land is very flat. in this section. The way it's laid out is like a very, very shallow bowl. You have three feet of water that covers a thousand square miles. It's a sheet of glass or a mirror. Very much so. During this wet season, as the river changes flow, which I, that's nuts to me. I'm having a tough time with that. You want to hear what's crazier? Remember when we learned about them timing this to where they'd be like, hey, remember when the river changes its flow and we can start sending supply. much easier, barely rowing up river.

And so there's entire seasons where they will do these like merchant shipments going up the river because there's so much easier to get up there. So soon as the monsoon season, soon as the wet season hits, you're going to have three months where the lake swells to a total depth of 10 meters or 33 feet deep. And it covers 6,700 square miles. 6,700 square miles. It's an inland sea. It, like it's, some people that live around the Great Lakes and large, large bodies of water, there is something very strange for people, for us, for us inlanders, there is something very strange about looking out in the distance and not seeing land.

Yeah. It is unsettling to me in a way that I really can't describe. So when I'm told that this is a lake, but I can't see anything on the other side of it, I can't see anything past the curvature, whatever it is of the earth, because this thing is so huge. That's an ocean at that point. But what this does is this, and these are freshwater like fish. Basically, there's like breeding season happens in all of this, and there's just an abundance of food because of this three months of the year when this thing expands so rapidly. But it also requires all of these houses to be built on like 20 foot, 30 foot,

stilts that they're constructing to make sure that during those three months of the year they're not completely flooded out. Minkong River is the second most biodiverse river in the world after the Amazon. So when the wet season happens and that flow changes

that means that all of that biodiversity is flowing right into that lake. And I have to imagine just thinking about this, the best fishing season, obviously it's going to be when the lake is more full, but is there a time when it starts to lower

a little bit to where it's a lot easier, like the fish get more concentrated or are they flowing out with the river? Yeah, I think that definitely makes sense because at a point it's going to start flowing back out and the water is going to start receding. At a certain point, depending on where fish are at the lake, there's going to be a pole

or as the water starts going down, maybe a natural drive to return to the main water, but there are going to be a lot that have spread themselves out over this fucking in 6,700 square mile lake that are going to be in like patches that are going to get

shallower and everything. So that's probably also, again buddy, it's all, you know, self-regenerating stuff. So as you're just getting tons and tons of this fish which you're smoking and preserving and doing everything you can, during these seasons,

they've got more than enough. And these people are going to become every civilization that's been successful that we've talked about has usually one common factor. It's a control of water because that is the most necessary resource to have for the success of a civilization. For an agrarian to, you know, be able to grow food or do anything like that, you have to have some way of irrigation. You have to have a control out of that. The way that they design the entirety of their civilization around the concept of like water control is what made

them so successful, but it was like a glass cannon. If something wrong happened and it didn't for a while, shit was going to go south quickly. If you have nine months of dry season, you have to figure out a way to save water for that. And that's where these barretes come in because this first barret that gets built by Indra Varmin the first, it's pulling water. out of this Tonle Sap Lake, when it's full, it's flowing into a reservoir that's 2.4 miles long by 2,600 feet wide.

This thing's almost a half mile wide and it's 2.4 miles long. And at this point in time, this was the largest reservoir, man-made reservoir that there ever was, previously leading up to this. Now, it's dried up now. This is the smaller one

Yes, this is a smaller one. The way that they built this, and again, this is just brilliance at work, because if you're going to dig out a giant pit that's 2.4 miles long by 2,600 feet wide, that's going to take forever, right?

There's not a way that I think you could do it just strictly for the, I mean, eventually, you've got a lot of laborers, but you either, you're digging out jungle. This is fucking jungle, which which means that you're digging through all those roots, you're removing all of that stuff. Or, or why don't we do this instead of digging a reservoir?

Because then what are we going to do with the water? The lowest point of the water is going to be inaccessible to us from an irrigation perspective because there's going to be no way to get it and pump it out. Why don't we actually build berms all the way around this thing and make these giant rectangular reservoirs of berms that are going to be 30 to, 40 feet high. And when you start building the big ones are going to be twice to three times the size of this, five times the size of Central Park.

And then design also a gate system in these in which, because once they build the berms, which the amount of dirt that it would take to build those to the point where they'd be thick enough at the bottom and then still tall enough at the top to be able to support the weight and the erosion of holding that many. cubic feet of water. 7.5 million cubic meters were held in this one. And this is a small boy, right?

Yeah. Okay. So they designed gates that a lot of like just like what am I trying to say? Modern irrigation uses. Yeah. Some of it is as simple as grooved stones in which you're putting in slats of either stone or wood or anything like that to control

the flow of that to allow water to come out. But the way these guys end up perfecting this system is it's not just like hey release the hounds and the water comes out and it floods the fields they design such a sophisticated series of canals that they have they're like okay release the water at this much um and then once it gets to a gathering point they have a diversional directional thing that's made of all stone and everything because erosion they can't have it being made of dirt because they're washed away they have these reinforced stone points where they can divert off certain percentages of the water to send them to the Western rice patties, to the Eastern rice patties.

And because of that, instead of these areas that if they were to just be left by themselves with the natural rainfall and everything, they would be able to harvest rice once a year. What the Khmerian Empire does is they create the system of reservoirs, the canals, the diversion of water, to be able to harvest rice three for three rice harvests. Three, sometimes four. Three and sometimes four. which means if your population is dictated and the strength of your populace is dictated

by how much you can feed and provide them, not only you keeping your population healthier, not only do you have more to export to bring more stuff into your country, but now you can support a larger population when it all comes down to it, what's going to win wars in a lot of situations? Food.

The larger size of the army. Oh, yeah, I guess feeding an army. Well, that's what it boils down to is when you can feed your army and they can actually march and fight. Yeah, right there. Well, if you have a population of a size where two harvests a year is going to feed that population and keep them fed, and you harvest three or four a year, that means that you have two harvests, one or two harvests,

that then you can export and sell and just become independently wealthy. Because we're going to be talking about some of these city population numbers that they have in, like Ankur compared to what they would be in London. Yeah. And the numbers are just astounding. It's incredible how much bigger this empire was. Part of the reason why it can get so big is because it has multiple harvest a year of rice that's the core of their diet that's going to be able to hold anybody to a good standard of living.

So you get your, and again, like when you think about how a populace survives and is healthy and develops, you have to have both your, you know, you've got the rice and everything like that, but now you have all the fish that you're able to get out of the tonal sap. So a healthier population that has more diverse dites and everything like that is always a more successful population. Well, fast forward to 889 with Yaso Varman I. He takes control of the empire. He establishes a new capital of Yaso Dahupura or Anchor.

Ancor would be the capital city of the empire for most of the next like approximately 600 years. There will be a deviation that comes up pretty quick, but they come back to Angkor because it's incredible. So it becomes the largest pre-industrial city in the world. The urban sprawl of the city covered 390 square miles, 1,000 square kilometers, which is larger in footprint than New York City. 300 square miles. So you have 90 more square miles. I don't remember New York City, I think. I'm going to get this way wrong.

It's between like 24 and 27 million people in New York City, I believe. You have a larger urban sprawl in less of a population. So the city is going to look very different. I want to explain kind of some of the cooler parts of Angkor when we start talking about Ancor Wat as far as like the fanciness in the city and what all they had. Yeah and Angkor like is kind of used

in a weird way in which it can refer to the region. It can refer to the people. The people. The people just the main city. And then Angkor Wat is actually more of like the temple itself. Inside the city. Exactly.

So have we got to where he actually, what was the name of the city that he established in Dravarman? I'm sorry, we're on, sorry, we're on Yassau Barman. Yeah. So he establishes the capital city of Yaso Daharpurah, which becomes Angkor. That's right. It's such a big urban sprawl.

Nowadays, when you think about within like a big city like New York, real estate is always going to come at a premium because buildings are so close. Yeah. The sprawl of this with the population becomes something completely different because it is a massive city, but you also have these massive. massive squares of land inside of the city that are being used for agricultural purposes. Yeah, everything is used. Each family, I think, had a pool or a pond, like in their backyard that they used for irrigation for their food. Rice paddies.

They used for bathing and everything like that. So, like, yeah, everyone had their own little area within the city, and you can't build up. No. That's the other thing, too. But it's still crazy that this city is just growing like this. and he also, I think this is the guy that begins construction on another beret to the east of the city

that's going to be twice the size of the previous ones because you know what he looked at the first one said you know what? That's the one my old man built or whatever it was. We're going to make ours bigger and we're going to go ahead and get even we can eargate more land. And that's the choice of where the city went is almost directly in between

the Kulin Hills. So all of the water that's to be flowing out of the mountains on that side. And then the Tonle sat very close that was connected by this thing called the Seam Reap River, that they changed the direction of the river to pour into this East Barre that you're talking about. He also spent the first year of his reign building 100 monasteries throughout the empire. So he is not only taking on these public works projects, but he's also making sure that on the religious side of things, he's building all of these Hindu monasteries to say,

we're not just an empire that's a, I'm not just a city builder kind of king, God king. I also, I want to emphasize the god in the God king name to show you that I am the holy leader. You're not building this to me. You're building this to the other gods. Because they had this weird thing where it was stone structures were only for the gods, correct?

Which means that the god king could live in them, right? Or was it that the god king could, the actual god gods had to live in them? So only temples could be stone. The temples are where you're doing all of your, like, sacrifices, everything to the gods. Yes. And within that, you have all of these,

um, shit, I forgot the word. Oh, these Brahmin, these Hindu Brahmin that are living there, they're living in the lap of luxury, basically, because this is where all the money is flowing into to these temples. And so they're living in basically palaces. But they made the rule that no one else could build their homes out of stone, right? In Angkor, the majority of the houses that were for the peasantry were all made of wood. Yes, yeah.

That's why there's none of those, but they're able to see the sprawl because there are still stone structures in all these little temple and, like, things spread throughout the entire area. They're just completely covered by jungle right now. But a ton of it when they've been doing like the LiDAR, like radar detection for the structures, they've been able to piece together the entire layout of it. What did they say it's larger than the sprawl of

was it L.A.? God, if it was, that would be incredible. I'm going to look for that because I had that written somewhere. So the East Barre that we were talking about that he built, this is going to be a little bit bigger than I believe Grandpa's Barre. This thing measures roughly about

four and a half miles long by 1.1 miles wide. This was built around 900 C.E. So you're talking about 11 years into Yasser Varmans' reign. This massive reservoir held between 35 to 50 million cubic meters of water. So we're going from 7.5 million cubic meters in the original baray to the east barret that's holding 35 to 50 million cubic meters a one. Oh, we still have the old one though, too. The old one's still in operation.

This is built kind of primarily because within this city of Ancourt, you have, just like you were talking about, to divert all this water to all these rice paddies outside of these cities in these agricultural areas. The insane thing about, I guess, the outside of the city rice patties that they were building is they had this special strain of rice,

this strain of rice depending on the rise of the water was able to grow up to 16 feet high it was known as floating rice because as the water would raise in certain areas the rice would continue to raise as well so depending on how deep your rice paddy was where you were trying to grow it

if you need to flood more water in that rice is going to be able to grow up outside of the water and not drowned they can grow up to I believe they said it was 10 centimeters a day. That was how fast it could grow. I would love to go and visit a rice patty just to see how all of that works.

I'm not going to piss on your parade, but I got one word that scares a shit out of me, and that's snakes. Oh, yeah. Don't like the thought of a snake swimming up on me. So if you can promise me a snakeless rice patty, I'm in. Okay, I'll find that for you. But the reason that these beret is so important

is because they're building these canal systems within the city of Angkor, all of these diversion dams and these dikes that are flooding these smaller rice patties. So it's roughly the same size as the city limits of Los Angeles or modern Berlin. Anchor? Yeah, the like the Angkor Urban Center. The core urban center is larger than modern New York City across all five boroughs combined. That's fucking nuts. Four times the size of modern Paris.

this is insane like you think Cambodia you're like the fuck off this was no yeah this was here it's I mean it's it's really hard to understand how big that is

in a medieval city and here's the thing too like when you look at the ruins of like Ancor and Ankara you're seeing it in there's this brown white stonish color like it seems to be speckled and everything it still looks amazing

like the structural designs and everything like that are incredible. It just has that ruin look. But back when these things were new, you got to like paint them in colors and imagine them smooth and not being able to see the cracks and all that. Just like when you picture like geese in the pyramids of having almost that white limestone smooth sides with a golden cap and everything.

Yeah, when you see it in that sense, it's like, it just, it's so incredible looking now, you almost don't even need that. The patina on it now is just as magnificent. And the tree, fuck, why am I obsessed with the tree? It's the coolest-looking thing, right? Banyan trees are pretty insane. They're kind of like a parasite,

whereas their seeds can attach to other trees, and they can basically, like, use that as the donor to where they'll grow all the way around the living tree. Yeah, and then they'll strangle it, and there will be these big hollow sections where the original like tree that they were living off of is. So there's hollow sections in them. And when these banyan seeds land on rock,

they do the exact same thing. They wrap their roots and everything around them. They're also punching all the way through this sandstone. Yeah, because they'll get small. And they'll get into a crack, but then those grow. And then they get hard like fucking cement. Pretty interesting to see how these banyan trees work. But they look like it was built into,

like does that make sense? It looks so crazy. It's like it almost welds itself into the stone. Yasser Varmine, just beyond what he did as a builder god king, his depictions show off this great war leader, this great and powerful leader. All these inscriptions show him leading this army into battle. He was kind of a shitty captain of an army. He did end up coming to power through four.

after his father had given the order of succession to his brother. So he ended up kind of a strong arming his way into the position of God King. And he disliked his dad so much so that they had the histories, the family histories of the reason that he came into power to favor his mother's side more than his father's side as far as the more legitimate claim. Which again, if you're falsifying something, the legitimate claim thing sounds. kind of confusing. It's especially like, you know, when you're the only one in control of it. Yeah.

He made an incursion into Champa and was repulsed pretty quickly. Like, it wasn't good at all. Rolled up, he's like, what's up, Champa, baby? What's going on? She was like, not right now. There's some... You ain't got no job.

There's some stories that I'm sure it comes out of Champa that they said that he was killed in battle. Interestingly enough, he more likely died of leprosy in 9-10. He was a leper king, which we've had a couple of those, I think Baldwin that was in Jerusalem was a leper king. There was another one that I can't quite remember. But leprosy was something that it stays dormant in your system for so long, and then it can spring up and like your fingers are off off. And when it does, it makes itself known. His son, Hasha Varmann I ends up succeeding him in 9-10 after he fell apart.

and his rule kind of followed by his younger brother, Yasha Vorman the second, marked this period of instability as they struggled for power because it was first Harshavarman and then it was Isha Varmine that were battling with this uncle that they had. I believe it was on the maternal side, so it was their mother's side. Yeah, because it didn't always follow like the really strict, what do they call that, pre-mogeniture. Yeah.

Or it's always giving it to, it's the Prince William Prince Harry situation. It's always the oldest son. Any prince with Royal Blood can make a claim. And then in that scenario, when you don't have a clear line and it's not made clear, that's where you get into these situations of civil war, someone storming off and creating a separate capital city. You're doing something like that. But after Yashav Armin ends up dying in like, what, 1910,

the empire kind of gets into and I guess that's when you could consider probably like it's what teenage years at that point when it's starting to kind of rebel a little bit and like you're around a century yeah and people are starting to kind of like be like well I should lead or that so you're going to get some like political discourse

and also yeah some pretty bloody civil wars plus you have Uncle Jaya Varmin the fourth he's the fourth Jaya Varmann he's not the second Isha Varmine he's not the first Harshavarman he's got a little bit more swagger. So in 1928, he would end up moving the capital temporarily from Angkor.

It wouldn't return until 1050 CE under the reign of Surio Varmann the first. And Suri Varmine the first is the guy that changes the game as far as we're talking about these barres. But what does that do, though? It's just like, Jai Vorma's like, listen, fine, fuck you two kids. I'm out of here. And his rebellion is, I'm not. not going to fight for Ancor. I'm going to just abandon the capital entirely. I'm going to march all of my followers, like 100 kilometers,

north, northeast, whatever, into the jungle. And then I'm going to build a rival capital. I'm going to call it co-care. And what, is that just something to where you don't have all the infrastructure there? So like, I'm just going to go build my own city

and people are going to go live there. You don't, but also, the same thing that got Yasha Varmann, the swag from building Ankor, is kind of the same thing that follows Jaya Vorman when he builds this new capital. Well, he has, apparently he has a shit ton of personal wealth because he builds this thing. It's called the Prasetham. And it's this like seven tiered pyramid temple. And apparently, I mean, if you look at it, kind of look at it in comparison to like Angkor Wat. there's a very distinct Cambodian Khmer Empire like architecture.

It's the closed lotus flower. It's a lot of like more... It has the five pillars too, right? Yeah, but this is more of a step seven like Mayan type thing. So this dude, the uncle ends up ruling from this place until he dies. And then after that, his successor is coming to the plate. He gets killed. And then they're just like, okay, so we all clear now capitals back in Angkor.

There's no second capital. Yeah, I mean, it takes till 1050, so you're talking 172 years that it's away. That's not right at all. 72 years plus 50 is 120. We could take a bathroom break and do the math. It's 122. Okay. Yeah, let's take a bathroom break.

Oh. Well, hello. Listen, while we head to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourselves? Head on over to patreon.com slash historically high and get signed up for a little bonus content. I mean, come on, you deserve it. If you want to keep up with this, our main source of social media is going to be our Instagram, which is historically high pod, P-O-D. You can also head over to it's Twitter, it's X, it's Twitter, come on. at historically high

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H-I-G-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-Podcast at gmail. All right. And with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. All right. So it was 122 years, which, yeah,

successor could have been one or two, guys. It's a real, what do you say, a real Vatican City Avenue to back to the, Yeah, moving to France and going back to the Vatican. The man that moved back was Sir Yvarmine the first, and Surrey Varmine begins the West Barre Reservoir. It ends up being completed between 1050 and 1066.

If they got back there in 1050, even at max, that's 16 years to build this West Barre. And it puts the first two to shame. So the approximate measurements of this West Barre were 4.8 to 5 miles long and 1.3 to 1.4 miles wide. So this is the one that is five times the footprint of Central Park in New York. It's stupid. Yeah. So this thing still will hold a ton of what. Like if you take a look at pictures of it, the scale of it, if you just kind of stare at it,

it actually kind of throws you off a little bit. But the amount of work that it would take to build like a 30. to 40 foot berm this far around thick enough and everything to be able to support this to bring in all of that earth just shows you like how big of a population they had and how big of a workforce that because this thing was done wasn't it done in like six years well that's that's what i mean if even if they got the earliest start on it when they got back in 1050 it gets completed between 1050 and 1066 so max it would take is 16 years it probably didn't take that with as much slave labor as they had

and what we've learned about how they built Angkor. And I mean, when they're building this and Angkor and everything, I think it was the it was the Mayans that were in Mexico, right? Aztecs were in Mexico.

Mayans were in the Yucatan Peninsula, I believe, and then Inka were Peru. So the Aztec city was the one that was turned into Mexico City, correct? Yep. Okay. Teno Chitlan. Yeah. Remember we talked to

about how it was built on like the floating thing and they had constructed it to where it was almost like waterways between the houses. This was built like that as well where they're like this paths within the city itself. They doubled as both irrigation for all of these like rice paddies and everything that were surrounding the area but then also as like a highway to get in and out of these places that people could just take like canoes or put cargo in or take it to the market and things. So like just seeing that visual would be a awesome. They said it was this crazy blend of just living

perfectly within the nature of what they were doing. We also never mentioned about the East Barre that there was a temple right smack down in the middle. Yeah, exactly. An island in a fucking temple built and it's not like a hey this is

you know a small little no this is a full on in the same style as all their other temples one built smack dab in the middle and their architecture of these cities is they have this thing about moats like around the main section

of the city where the temples are built and the first one I think is rectangular, correct? Mm-hmm. And then this... All pretty much are. One of them is perfectly square. And I think... Oh, the temples?

I thought you're talking about the barres. Nope. The first city was the one that had the rectangular one. The first city we talked about the second city that's Angkor, they did a perfectly square one. and so they also had all of that water being fed in there as well from like the canal system.

So this West Barre, I understand that we got the measurement a little bit different than these cubic meters, holds roughly about 14 billion gallons of water. It's so big. So, so big. You also get King Suryavarman II that begins this temple of Angkor Watt. that we've been talking about and been alluding to. This starts right around 1113. It takes roughly 30 years to build using slave labor.

And Anchor Watt, the reason it takes 30 years to build is because Anchor Wad is the largest religious monument in the world. Dedicated to the God Vishnu, site covers 400 acres. Vatican City, 121 acres. It's that much bigger. Just this temple that's in the middle of Anchor, or that's in the middle of the city, middle of Angkor. As far as the temple goes, there's five central towers. They're set up in like the five on the side of a dice.

Two on the outsides, one directly in the middle. Would you use a dice fire? It's hard. It's hard. Yeah, because you look at it from the front and it looks like, I'm trying to think of the, and this is the watt, or is this? This is what, yeah. Okay.

These five central towers symbolize the P. of Mount Meru, which is the home of the Hindu gods. So this is the crossover. This is the Mount Meru is the Mount Olympus of the Hindu mythology. It's surrounded by this outer moat that Chris was talking about. This moat measures 620 to 650 feet wide. This is how wide it is. This isn't the distance.

This isn't how long it is. This is from outside of the city, across the moat. to inside of the temple is 650 feet. That's how far away that is. Total perimeter of just the moat itself is three miles long. It stretches 4,920 feet east to west and 4,265 feet north to south. It's really hard to visualize it, and that's why pictures are going to be key. The average depth of the moat itself is 13 feet, and this is to symbolize the cosmic oceans

of milk that you were talking about earlier in the origin story of man that surrounds Mount Merrow. The moat itself is really hard for me to understand just how much digging it would take just to build the moat itself. Before we even get into the

construction of the temple inside the moat, you build that big of a moat. You haven't... Okay, so we're still at the point in this the empire where it's still a god king right? You're never short people. No.

You're, very true. You're the, you're a god, man. Like if you want a fucking moat, a moat's gonna get done. Yeah. Regardless of what, regardless of the cost of the moat, the moat's gonna get done.

It's just. Because if you ain't happy, you'll cause a drought or you'll do something. And the people don't want to test you because everything you've done or everything that's happened since all of these god kings have really been going through here

technically even though there's been these little skirmishes or inner family rivalries and everything the people have still been doing pretty fucking good because like the empire itself is prospering there's like some back and forth infighting but water's still on food's still growing

like it's kind of don't have electricity yet but everything else is taken care of thank God Jesus, can you imagine if this empire had mastered hydroelectric power? Yeah. There is an interesting argument that I was thinking of just because we're, as you're talking about, like, if you can harness the water, you can control everything.

Would you rather be in the period of the, like, Roman Empire when they had all of the, aqueducts? Yeah. And basically, like, cities that had all of the waterworks. underneath it and all of the piping and everything like that? Or would you rather live in an empire like the Khmer Empire where you don't necessarily have like water flowing to your house or flowing to baths, but you have canals that are draining water into your cash crop rice paddy. I mean, technically some of these people had their houses like with the back part of the house facing the canal.

Yeah. So like I don't even if you just dumped the piss bucket or anything like that. that seems more natural to me because it would be a lot harder time for someone to interrupt that water flow because it's just in with nature. Like you're diverting it and you're telling you where to go. But technically it's still built within the landscape. The whole thing with the Romans with the aqueducts is like some of them were elevated. All you got to do is fucking destroy part of an elevated aqueduct in the water doesn't get to the next portion that it's fucked.

Well, just as far as in the city, too, it would be more beneficial for me to be able to flood my rice paddy than to go. get in a communal bath. You know if you have rice paddies in the city, people have spread the fuck out from you. In Rome where everyone's just living amongst everyone else, it's not a large part of the population that's getting that water

to be able to bathe and wash themselves and shit. So you're pretty much still just living with on top of people. I always think about that when I think of like a new time frame we're talking about. What would it smell like?

This to me does not feel like it would smell. I don't think it smells, and I do think that you have, you're in water so much that I think, even though you don't have soap or anything like that, naturally your... Water is such a, it's, it's, it's, what am I trying to say? It's, um, purifier almost. Not a purifier, uh, when it's, it's a symbiotic relationship that they have with this. Yeah, very much so. And so you're in it so much and you have such an abundance of it that, yeah, that's when you can afford to be like, why aren't we a clean culture? You talk about like London, this place, if you think about it, when Anger, Core was at its peak, maybe a million, somewhere between 750,000 to a million people that live within this large swath of land. Yeah, 10th century, I think, is when they said that it hits its, it's zenith, or maybe it's

the 11th century. At the same point, you have London that's sitting around like 40,000 to 50,000. Paris is sitting around 10,000. And these places just probably, I fear for the smell of these places you would get there. and it wouldn't be the fucking darkened skies. It wouldn't be the people in their weird outfits that would fucking shock you the most. You would take a breath

and you'd just be like, the fuck is all of that. And it's just all this shit everywhere. And here you really only get close enough to where you can see each other wave probably unless you're going to the temple or to the square or anything like that. Yeah.

The layout of the towers is just talking about the precision you were talking about with like rectangular and then perfectly square cities. The layout of the towers is strategically aligned with the cosmos. So during the spring equinox, the sun rises directly over the center tower. So as you're staring at, the sun comes up directly over the tallest tower in the center of the temple. That's, you're pretty in tune with the mathematics and the mapping of the stars

and sun rises to be able to look at that and say, okay, during this specific time of year, Every single year at this time, the sun will rise directly over the center pillar. You're showing a very intelligent understanding. Oh, 100%, because you know the equinoxes and equinoxes and everything like that. So that this is something that I found pretty interesting in kind of the way that I, as we were talking about the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism. So the temple has these super duper intricate wall carvings. There's over 1,800 unique depictions of these celestial dancers.

They just stretched for miles. And these are just the outer walls around Anchor Wat and then the walls inside of the temple. And from every documentary that I watched, the smoothest parts of all of these carvings were the breasts on the women. This was a no joke. This was a booms out society. Uh-huh. So the outfit, male or female, was just usually like the thing around the woman. the waist, like either what is

strong. Yeah, I think so. Or like, you know, pant type things or just probably a wrap most likely being that they were around water most of the time. But yeah, it was just boobs out at all times. And it's very clearly depicted in all of the artwork that this is how it went down, which

I think is a very beautiful way for a society to, you know, to work. This is very similar to like when you see a statue or something like that and you rub the head for good luck and it's always the Chinese part. Yeah.

The Chinese parts of every one of these celestial dancer release is always their tits. Yep. And it's because now I think they get somewhere around an average of like two million visitors a year. So if you have 1,800 of these things out, but you're getting 2 million people a year, that's probably every one of those walking up and copping a feel on the dancers. Those boys are going to get smooth quick. You're going to wear down that sense of fast.

There has be restoration. That's where all of the restoration money goes. The budget is just trying to resurface all the kids. A bunch of horny fucks, yeah. I'm not leaving. It also depicts these large scenes of these old Hindu epics on the wall. And this is where we're talking about how the history that is the Khmer Empire in their belief system is just laid out for you to be able to see. So Si Yavarman the second is the one that commissions Encore.

Is that correct? So really quick, because a lot of the stories that take place with the founding of the Khmerian, or Khmerian Empire, and then also more current events that are actually carved into that is a lot of what Sea of Armand I actually did. So at the turn of the millennium, I think Sea of Armand I first came in around, what would be, 102. Possibly. So I think he only ruled for like eight years. So the empire itself was kind of torn apart during this nine years civil war when two rival kings

basically claimed the throne at the same time. time. So there was this guy, his name was Suey of Armin the first, or I don't know what his original name was because these guys take a title. It's not just coincidental that they all have varmin at the end of their name. And brilliant military commander, he ends up kind of systematically just picking off like his rivals. So insurance never going to happen again, he forces like thousands of these little provincial officials, people basically working for the government. traveled to the royal palace in in court and they have to swear a blood oath of total 100% allegiance and they have to carve their promise into the stone doorway of the palace so he can point at any

point and say you know you did that so once kind of the ins you know internal stability ends up getting restored they turn their focus outward see if there's anything going on with expansion of the empire they had this at that point had established a pretty significant military both land, but then also transportation of the troops by all of these waterways. They had these, this is where we get to talk about the war elephants again, the heavy cavalry that they had while over in fucking Europe, they're riding horses like a bunch of simps here in Cambodia were riding war elephants that were armored. They also would have like shit strapped to their tuss to where they could charge into air.

enemy lions and just swing and, like, beat the shit out of people. Can you imagine the fear of just having a fucking elephant charging at you? My soul leaves my body seeing an elephant charged towards me. If I see a horse charging towards me, there's going to be some element of fear with somebody riding on the back. An elephant, I've already shit my pants. Then it's six feet in front of me because I'm already running. You are taller than me. And I still feel like even without anything on its back, a horse running at you would still have your soul leaving your body.

just because they are bigger than you think. I, and maybe this is just stupid confidence. I feel like I would be a lot, it would be easier to dodge a horse running at full speed to where it can't change directions, where I feel like an elephant running at me could kind of stalk me because he's slow enough to where he could move either direction to cut off my...

I think it's opposite. I think a horse at the last second could spring to one side or the other kind of like, I think an elephant, yeah, they could, but they could only make little maybe like, shifts. I don't want to find out either. No, I would... The old elephant or the horse debate.

I'd much rather be trampled by a horse than an elephant. Actually, no. I take that back immediately because the elephant would kill me immediately. Yeah. The horse is going to do a lot of damage that I'm going to have to either live through or slowly die through. Yeah, a collarbone, shatter some ribs, leave you just gasping for, like, not being all to breathe. So death by elephant? Yeah.

Okay. they also would use these like massive further time of course but multi like ord they called them war galleys on the tonal sap and so okay i gotta get into the naval aspect of this and nerd out for a little bit here because like weapons and the navy and everything so the power on the water allowed them to rule this entire not only a thousand square mile lake in the dry season but But also during the wet season, it expanded the reach of the Navy and the importance of the Navy because that's how they would fight. But there were full on naval battles between them and rival countries on this lake. And so, of course, ocean-going vessels are different than lake-going and river-going vessels. So while some of these countries had also like navies or even shipping that went out into the ocean, these guys had their own version of that. Dragon boats. And the, yeah.

So the ships, dude, they were like solid wood ships that were carved out of one fucking enormous tree that they had to find in the deep jungle that was long enough and straight enough to make these 30 to 40 rower war galleys where they would take, okay, so they take the tree and they get it cut, I believe in half first or something like that. and then they would control burn and carve out the entire inside shape. So literally taking hot coals, softening the wood burning it, and then putting it out, scraping it out, doing the same thing, over and over and over again,

until they were able to get it into the shape where it was recessed. Then they would take fire underneath it after they got it wet and soaked it to create a whole bunch of steam and use the wood once it was pliable to then use like stretching devices to force it down to, to shallow the draft of a little bit, but to widen it out to where they could have rowers in there and actually have some room.

Have you ever seen this process? No. It's one of the more insane things that I've ever seen. Out of a single piece of wood, right? To be able to bend wood that way and make it that pliable, but you can bend it and then you can stick rods in the middle to hold it while it dries.

Yeah. It blows my mind. It mystifies me that a tree that could be standing that tall and be that strong could then be made wet and pliable and then stretched out like a piece of mozzarella. They would carve it like two inches thick. Like I mean, so it's still a two inch thick fucking piece of. And so that's why on the heads of these things, they would have these ornate carvings of like dragons like you were saying.

And then to make these war galleys, they would just simply plank up the sides to make these things deeper to where guys could stand up and be firing, you know, shots and archers could be like firing out of them. Well, it's still shallow enough that you could get your oars over the side. and create a rhythm. And get up close to the bank. Because remember, even in the time when it was the dry season,

three meters is all the average. Like, you have to be able to get shallow water to be able to transport troops and everything. If you fall overboard during the dry season, they probably don't leave you behind. They probably just wait for you to crawl back up into the boat. To see if you could stand first. That's the, you can't,

if that's like an embarrassing, like a badge of shame is when you fall out and you are like, And then all of a sudden you put your hands down and you just kind of pick yourself up and you can walk and catch up to the boat and you just have to get back in. If you fall in and you start screaming that you're drowning in the dry seas that over, just stand up. Yeah. That's all you got to do. So the ships would have these like large, heavy ores mounted at the rear. So you know when you see sometimes in like movies, sailing movies, they don't have like a wheel for the actual rudder.

It's their holding the stick at the back and just kind of moving it that way. Yeah. That's what these had for steering. but they were obviously very, very nimble. They would have, sorry, they were used not just for transport, but then also to transport like all of their heavy equipment across all of the jungle,

like bypassing the entirety of the jungle. That floating fortresses. So like when they would go to war, because the kings and generals would want to be close to it, not in the front lines, they would take some of these, like the war canoes, I guess that's what we could call them,

the war galleys, and you would just have a few of those together and have a platform built across them. And then in the middle, the platform would have these covered pavilions, and those would serve as like the flagship. So you basically have like the fucking generals or the king sitting there on a fucking recliner or like his cushy shit,

just watching the battle from afar of guys just ramming into each other in these fucking war canoes. It's so hard. for me to visualize this just because of all the actual sea and ocean battles that we've talked about. Even thinking back to like the Spanish galleons

that we were talking about coming up and attacking England or the Armada. Those things had drafts in them that were probably 30 feet deep at least. So even inside of a lake, like the ships couldn't be big.

They had to be these small drafts. boats that were so agile, while at the same time they're conducting, I'm assuming, spears, atlattles, bow and arrows, something like that? No, I got you. I got you. I got you baby. I got the weapon recovery coming here at a second. It's still a very, it's almost a more violent situation because it's so much more hand-to-hand

or kind of similar. So, I mean, they had iron-tipped arrows, so they would be trying to, like, is the ships would close the distance because they wanted to get close. It was a boarding action type situation. So as they started to get close, part of that was probably the importance is you didn't know how shallow it was. So they're like,

we can't just capsize these guys. They'll just stand up. We've got to board their ship. We've got to actually like kill them and everything. Then they're going to spread out and they're going to be harder to hit. Exactly. So you would have the archers position like at the bow on like elevated platforms and they would basically just be firing out in front as they're

approaching. Once the boats actually collided, soldiers would use spears, swords, grappling hooks to board the other ship, and then basically just be fighting across it. So some of the things they would use, these are, and one of these is actually a completely unique, like Cambodian Khmer Empire-type weapon. It was called, I'm going to fucking butcher this.

It's called the FACACC. P-H, little apost, K-A-K. So it's this iconic, Khmer weapon, it is a, I'm trying to think of how to like describe the blade, almost like a very long rectangularish blade with maybe a little bit of a flare at the top, but then attached to a long like wooden or bamboo staff that almost looks like a cane or what am I trying to say like a yeah, that. So almost like a putter with just a little head at the end or like a what would you call it like a failed hockey stick? Yeah, it's almost like a,

a wheat thresher. Yeah, but it's weird because at the top of the hook, that's where you would mount the blade on this. But the reason they did that is it had kind of like a hook on it. So it doubled not only as like an agricultural tool, but then they would use it in battle because if you're in those boats and you reach over with that blade part of it could hook the ship and you could drag it in.

And it had reached to it so you could be swinging it from a distance. They would even actually use it like on elephant back. because it would reach that far down. They could just swing it down and hit stuff on the ground. It is kind of like tying a knife to the end of a shalele. Kind of, yeah.

Like, put a big at that, a knife. Like, this is a knife. Legitimate knife. It's literally like a two, what, like a 16 inch to two foot blade, it looks like. They had another thing called the dab, which the dab was the single edge sword

that resembled like a long saber. So dangerous. Yeah. Dads are dangerous. And then some of them had like extended handles that can measure up to like fight. So basically you would have like sometimes a five foot long stick within a sword on the top of it just to have this huge like reach weapon.

You can tell a lot of this is like naval oriented too because you're not always right next. You're slashing as you're trying to pull the other boat in. They had spears and javelins. That was kind of the primary shock weapon for the like the infantry. And then bows and arrows, of course. that was kind of a core component of especially on top of the platforms on the war elephants was just platforms for archers. They had fucking ballista.

What's that? Ballista is basically the large crossbow things like a like stationary or mounted, like artillery, like old school crossbow artillery like a big ass crossbow. And they put them on the backs of elephants sometimes. A crossbow wielding elephant Well, and they think where they got that is They would utilize them And they most likely

The technology wasn't theirs alone But it was either adopted from Chammercenaries that they had kind of done You know, dealings with and everything Who had pretty much adapted it from seeing shit Where else of course in fucking China The flow of ideas go south Yeah

Huh Yeah it's cold north Yeah They move much much slower up north standard like peasant soldiers kind of the bulk of the forces

wore pretty much just whatever it was like a tunic or even fighting like bare chested you mean not a suit of armor no no no that was actually reserved for like higher ranking officers and kings would wear the ornamental like metal breastplate or

hard and like you know boiled leather and stuff that had been basically like then reinforced to predict against like arrows or slashes Nothing that resembled the tin cans of Europe. I think sometimes if you, this is, like we talked about, the time frame, we are in the Common Era. We're at a thousand right now. We want to say this is 1,000 26 years ago.

Rome is when? We're talking Rome is in the fucking is before Common Era, which means, right? Yeah. I think we were, the Byzantine Empire was still going as they were fighting with the Arab Empire in Constantinople. So I kind of think about it in the sense of like culture would have gone across and they would have seen, especially like God Kings, you know they're getting all of these people coming in, seeing their empire. Tell me stories about these lands you've seen. It's a Marco Polo situation. The only reason we can't confirm that is because they wrote it down on shit that's no longer around.

and they used all the room that they had on their walls for their history, rightfully so. But I definitely see stories from like Greek and Roman sources and everything coming through about those decorative fucking breastplates with like the fucking abs and shit like that. I definitely see that being the type of stuff, but like made of gold and ornamental and stuff of these generals. More form fitting or at least the form they want to portray. Yeah, exactly.

Just to point out what's going on. I could be completely. fucking wrong on that. But I just see that as being like, yeah, that kind of seems to be the pinnacle of like what ornamental armor is like. And when you're talking about these carvings and reliefs, that's how they're portrayed.

So whether or not it was exactly like that, they were fantastical in these carvings. They were trying to be anectomically appealing. So, just to flash over, 11th century, 1096 to 1099 is when we get the first crusade. So that's what's going on over in Europe.

We're doing the first crusade over in Europe during 1096 to 1099. And these people got elephants carrying commanders and kings that are issuing flag signals and trumpet commands and all this kind of stuff to their soldiers fighting on giant lakes. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, those are the stories that you're seeing play out on these carvings on Anchor Wat.

You're seeing a history that's fairly recent, but it's also being blended in with all of these old Hindu stories. therefore strengthening this religious feel of these kings that they're having. But just to get back to a little bit of the geography of Ancour Wat, the height of this central tower raises 213 feet in the air, so 65 meters into the air, which means that they had to get up at least 210 meters in the air, or 210 feet in the air, to cap this thing off with this giant lotus. Yeah.

did you so when you look at it does it remind you kind of of like a pine cone a little bit yeah so and what i mean by that is if you're looking at it and it looks like a lotus bud it also looks like it has the little things that are kind of sticking back up like thorns almost either that or maybe that's the opening of the petals that's what i'm trying to figure out because it's very jagged like and of course they try to do reconstructions of what it looked like but the reason that stands out to me is those are so intricate like there's so many things of them. It's not just like, I'm not trying to poo-poo on other structures and all this kind of stuff, but if you look at something like the Romans did in just terms of like, let's say like the outside of the Pantheon or something like that. Beautiful columns,

beautiful Roman architecture, all that stuff. It's fantastic. They stole it from the Greeks. When you look at something like this, it is so elaborate because there are faces carved into the stones and there are like the gates that's

Ancourt had, I think. The city had five gates, one on each side, and then a victory gate that went into the, like, the royal palace. And above each gate was these intricately card huge towers that have a face carved on every single side. And then at Angkor Watt, it's a lot of this same stuff

where you can actually see the stone faces. Of course, now it looks like you can see the separation of the blocks and everything. But just being like, this was so perfectly placed and then smoothed over to where this didn't even look like stone. Like this was painted and colored and kept up to like date and could have been gold leafed or something. So happy that you're bringing this up because you were talking about not to shit on other things.

We're about to. Okay. So just for the Anchor Wat temple itself, just for this Angkor Wat complex that's within Anchor, they estimate that they used five to ten million heavy sandstone blocks for construction and there was no mortar between these these were so intricately and precision cut so what they would do is you would have the top block

and where it was going to go whatever block was going to go on top of or the bottom block and you would put water between them and then they would just grind them back and forth and then put more water and grind them back and forth until they fit so smoothly and so locked together that you couldn't get anything between them. It's brilliant.

It's such a fine strategy. Okay. This isn't a place that gets monsoons, right? Very wet. Yeah. Which means that the water table, especially of being so close to so many of these rivers and all this kind of stuff,

is also going to be kind of probably shift a little bit and everything. A lot of these structures are kind of falling. There's a restoration efforts trying to get these things rebuilt and get them reinforced. The banyan trees are growing through shit and all that. Not at Anchor Watt, but at like the city of Angkor and the ruins and everything. Starting to get into Encore what? You have to get across a 650 foot moat to get in there.

I mean, they knew what they were doing. It was built to last. Uh-huh. But these things are built on land that you don't think you would build stuff like this. They were so good about, they call it a hydraulic city, which is fucking cool, just the term. and it's because it was designed in which the stone that is like the filler stone that is built behind the bones I guess

of these places are I think it was ladder right I think we said right and it's this like iron rich it's rich in another metal but it is like a clay type stuff you can get out of the ground and then it hardens like fucking iron it's very porous as well they knew that monsoon the water drainage had to be thing they knew fucking everything about water so they designed the interior of this out of this

more porous stone that would help with the drainage and that way you wouldn't get separation inside of an inner wall pushing out on an outer wall or anything. It's precision plus also just a knowledge of the resources that you have. But like think of it in the sense of you look at the pyramids

and of course the reason that they're so when you get close to them that they look the way they do is because they've been picked apart they've been stolen from over years and years and years. You also have giant sandstorms that are pelting the... Correct, but what's even more destructive than that? Hundreds, almost a thousand years of yearly monsoon seasons

of just torrential water downpour, and these places haven't eroded. No, they're certainly not to their former glories, but they were saying that a lot of these carvings on like the exterior walls that would be more prone to getting hit. Yeah. Or still, like, they originally believed that they were about 10, centimeters deep that they would go in.

And some of these reliefs are only down to like eight centimeters. So over a thousand years, you've seen only two centimeters of... They're reading Sanskrit off the outside walls of these, yeah. Just to point out the comparisons between the pyramids, that 10, or that five to 10 million sandstone blocks that we were talking about that they used in Anchor Wat alone is more than the total stone that was used in all the Egyptian pyramids combined. Now, there are some caveats to that because Anchor Wat was, they were mining these blocks at Mount Kulin that was about 25 miles away. They were transported through the canals on the rafts. The reason they were able to do it is because a lot of these stones that were used weigh about 440 to 6,600 pounds, or 660 pounds is compared to the tonnage that was being taken out of the massive blocks. that were being used on the Egyptian pyramids.

The reason that they used so many more is just because they were so much smaller, which also goes to the... Yeah, so some of the stuff that was used in the Egyptian temples could weigh up to four tons. So 8,000 pounds compared to 660 max that they're moving down the river. They knew what they were doing.

They knew what they were doing. It's still fucking laugh. It's still there in the middle of a jungle. Well, at the same time, it calls into question so much more the ability to float that stuff. down the Nile because it was just that much bigger. You have such an intricate design to build these.

And granted, everything that goes on inside the pyramids, super cool, super elaborate, all of the chambers and the tombs and everything like that. You have a lot of these intricate rooms inside of Anchor Wat. While at the same time, you have all of the adornments on the outside, all of the carvings to create these lotus tops and these towers. There's like there's, you're very hard pressed to find stone in Angkor Wat that is not carved. Like, that would be a hunt. You would have to be like, hey, this doesn't look carved. And they're like, actually, it's carved to not look carved. You're like, fuck.

But it doesn't look carved, but there is a pattern on it. I mean, but the story, like you said, it's, it's meant to go ahead and be, you know, the manifestation of like the Hindu cosmology on Earth. and it's a long tail. Maybe the most interesting thing about Ancour Watt is a majority of these other temples face west. Everything face west or everything face east. Anchor Watt faces west in the direction of Shiva, the destroyer. So because it's facing west instead of east like everything else, I imagine that probably has something to do with the rising sun in the east and the

setting in the west. The destruction would have to be facing towards the west, but it becomes a funerary temple for Sir Yvarmine II, which he dies before the end of the construction. And I don't know, I didn't get deep enough into how they treat a body after it dies, but his remains were then moved into Ancor Wat's funerary tomb. Yeah. Like, I want to say it was like 25 years after he died. So probably pretty gross to move that unless he's just in the sandstone box that you can just transport. You want to hope so. You don't want to crack the seal on that. Fuck, no, you do not. Probably not.

Didn't we talk about that when it was Jengis, right? Yeah. Yeah. He got bloated and stinky as they were moving him back. He was made out in China when he died, right? Yeah. So as we're talking about just how all, how big Angkor was,

this was the number. So in the 13th century was the peak population of Angkor. So 1,200 to 1,300, between 700,000 to a million people in that same time period in London, about 20,000 people. At one point during its time, it was the largest city on Earth, right? Yeah, the largest pre-industrial city on Earth. All because you were able to manipulate water and grow rice at a rate to where you could have a city of a million people and be able to support them all. Yeah.

Because they're kind of supporting themselves with all these rice patties inside of Angkor. It's incredible. The city relied, as we were talking about earlier, on this massive network of canals and dikes and barres from the outside. And as Chris was saying, three to four harvest a year of rice that you're getting. So you're eating four times the amount of harvest, four times the amount of rice that's somewhere else that would have an equal size agrarian area, but doesn't have control of the water system to be able to. They're having to do it the old-fashioned way where it's just at the whims of Mother Nature. Yeah. And brother nature.

Housing outside of the top caste system that we're living in these temples and within some of these giant mega structures, it was all wood. And that becomes a problem because when Anchor starts to get pointed at from some of these other rising empires, the raids that would come into town, the easiest thing to tear apart and burn down where all the wood structures of the. peasants that were working in the city. Well, they're also the furthest out. Yeah. Anchor Wat is located southeast, like, in Anchor proper. Mm-hmm. So we're going to talk about another city that comes in that's pretty impressive, too.

But you're going to see what a purpose-built city is, as opposed to Anchor Wat being built after Anchor was already kind of established. Yeah. There's a king name De Havaran Devaran Devaran Devaran

the second who dies right around 1860 The heir Jaya Varman the seventh was usurbed

by his brother Yasa Varman the second And Jaya went He was something called

a Shit, where is it What kind of Buddhist was he? We'll get to when we get to it

He was a Buddhist Buddhist being a peaceful guy allows his brother Yassav Arman the second to take the throne Jaya goes ahead and exiles or exiles himself to Champa which is a competing empire. Look to the east yeah

with Yaso in power there was a court official whose name I'm not going to try we're just going to call him a court official because it's there's more letters in this than it feels like there is in the alphabet kind of leads

a violent coup and during this violent coup, Jai Varm in the 7th, returns to Ankur to support his brother. So he's supporting his brother. Well, he's on his way. Yeah, yeah. To support his brother.

A man who took the God King role away from Jai Varm in the 7th is going to support his brother as he's being usurped for the throat. He's a chill guy, man. He is. He's very, very chill. Yaso would end up being killed. the court would be taken over by the court official.

He returns to Champa, and as he's in Champa, there is a champ invasion that gets launched on Angkor. I just see him riding back on his horse, and he's like, we're almost there. We're almost inside of the city. And a messenger rides up, and he's like, oh, you're here to greet us.

He's like, your brother is dead. The other guy's taking the throne. He's just like, all right, everybody, turn it around. And then as he's going back, he sees all this Cham army that's flowing out of Champa headed back towards it. Yeah.

And Champa shows up. They do what we're going to see kind of becomes more commonplace. And they end up killing the court official and sacking the city. They burn Anchor down. They raise the whole entire thing. So Jaya Varman returns to Angkor to take the throne

after the Champa raised the city. They looted everything. thing. Now as King Jaya Varman the seventh, he raises an army, which is kind of an interesting thought because a Buddhist, a Mahayana Buddhist, that was what I was looking for earlier, somebody that was very nonviolent that wouldn't fight his brother for the crown that didn't make it back in time to support the bloody coup that his brother went through, wasn't going to fight that guy. That's the coup. Okay. So you have, okay, you got Jaya Varmin the seventh. I'm just going to call him seven. You got seven. His older brother, he's in line. He's picked. It's his older brother that takes it from him, right? Because he was selected by his father as the younger brother. And his father's like, I want your younger brother to rule. Older brother still comes in. He's like, I guess he called shotgun. I'm going to back out to Champa. All of a sudden, there's a coup and it's an inside job. He's like, I got to go support my brother, even. though he's a D-bag, because it's the right thing to do on his way there,

the guy that's throwing the coup ends up pulling it off and becoming the leader. He goes back to Champa. He doesn't attack the guy that just took his rightful throw. So he goes back. Champa's then like, there's instability going on over here. This is the perfect time to attack. And it's not like when Jayavarman, the seventh, is going back to Champa. He's going to be in like at the royal court in Champa.

He's just in Champa. That's where he's at. so as they then come in they overthrow they end up killing the public official the court official and they just leave it

leaderless and just kind of in ruin then Jai Varmann comes back and he's like no one else is here to go ahead and do it I'm going to step in he starts piecing everything

back together and during this time when he's trying to piece everything back together he's like my people have been real fucked up and he's looking around

and he's looking all the death and all the destruction and that part of him that's the pacifist and everything that that just kind of like that does the Homer Simpson and it just steps itself right back into the bush and he's like okay okay but if we're going to do this we're going to do it the smart way so instead of launching this hasty trying to counter and pretty much just try to slap fight with the um the champa he's like what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and just kind of pull back. We're going to stay quiet. We're going to start building up

our forces. What is that to go from being a pacifist to like a finely skilled military commander? What does that say the fact that this guy was raised as a nonviolent person? But then when he's forced

into a violent position to lead people, he does very, very well. Is that just pent up? same reason that I don't feel I'm not a violent person I don't believe in violence but if you set me in front

of a fucking D&D map and you say you need to kill this group of enemy soldiers I'm going to devise a very good plan to try to kill all of them I think it's just like you have a survival instinct I think the whole humanity aspect of it is that you don't have to give

into those base instincts that you really don't need anymore but that are just left over from residual the time we had to actually survive by killing other people. Yeah, I guess maybe that's it, is you spent so much time thinking about what you could do while never acting on it, that once it comes time to act on it, you're ready. Also, think if you're bored and you just like to read a lot,

how much, like, literature out there is actually, like, non-war adjacent where you're not reading about somebody's military successes. He ends up spending months unifying all of these fractured Khmer factions, the regional governors who are pretty much like being, you know, because they're being occupied by the champ. Or by, yeah, the champa, he's like, okay, listen, I got a plan. Let's take our time. Let's build up a plan to get these guys out of here. So as he kind of organizes more of a discipline, actual army, instead of just like a small resistance,

he starts basically just running a guerrilla campaign and ambushing all these Champa supply lines and just kind of not trying to make one giant thrust to like force them out or to chop the head off the snake, he's going to try to death by paper cut him. He's playing with them. This is his land. He's cutting supply lines that are actively feeding this cham army that's inside of his own border.

And it's weakening their hold on it. And all of a sudden, once he's ready, the turning port of this war becomes this huge, bloody naval battle that's fought on Tonal Sap Lake. it's connecting rivers. It's got us just span an insane like amount of ground, right?

Yeah, it's it was either a massive war during the rainy season or it was a very tight war. Well, the other thing too is he kind of learned from what had worked before because he's looking at he's like, how did the,

how did the Champa like get anchor before? They came in with like a shit ton of ships we weren't expecting and he's like so we just do that, right? and they're like, you think that'll work? He's like, if it worked once, it could work in. They're not expecting us to come in force. They don't even really know we're like gearing up for this thing.

So you have all these Khmer ships that are packed with archers and soldiers. They're armed with all these weapons that we talked about. They're ramming all these chan vessels. This is all immortalized on the carving of the Bayonne Temple, which is in the center, I believe, of the city, correct, that we're going to talk about. Mm-hmm. That's okay. Do you think that there was a period of time where he took like two weeks and just walked around Anchor Watt and was looking around seeing all of these carvings of all of these old Lake Naval battles?

Yeah. It's just like, hmm, like that. You know what this could use? I'll make sure I add this on mine. I want us to be like tossing these fuckers to crocodiles and shit. After this naval battle, he's pushed the Chom basically. back into their borders. And after he does that, he goes ahead and marches to the capital of Champa in 1190.

And this Mahayana Buddhist goes ahead and absolutely fucks up the city. They don't necessarily raise the city, but they take the capital. They also capture the king. And then they strap chains on the king and they march his ass all the way back to Angkor while they finish up mopping up in Champa. So by 1203, Champa's entirely subdued and becomes a vassal state of the Khmer. I believe there's another decade after that

where they're occupying Champa before they finally are pulling themselves back. Yeah, because while Seven's busy doing all this, so he ends up beating them in the naval battle, cuts them off, weakens their forces even more so, then he himself goes to Encore to actually liberate it to make sure that it's taken. and they have to fight street by street.

After getting the champ governors out of there, killing them and getting rid of them, he officially ascends to the throne. I think it's in 1181. He's 60, kind of around 60 at this point. And this is what you're talking about. He's like, I got to make sure at this point I'm 60. Depending on who the next leader is,

shit goes south. They try to invade. I need to make sure while I'm still able to oversee this, that they're not a problem anymore. And then that's when, while he's actually like rebuilding and fortifying Ancor with like new walls, he's like, they're not going to fucking sneak up on us again. We're going to build new walls.

That's when he basically takes his army while all these civil projects are going on. I say projects when I basically mean, again, forced labor. He goes into Champa and it was what called, I'm going to, it's not Vijaya. Is it, Vigaya? It's Vigaya, right? Depends on which way you're looking at it. If she's laying on her side, it's Vajaya, and if she's laying on her back and right front, it's Vagia.

But yeah, that's where he, and that's where he basically is just like you're now, uh, uh, or you're now a part of the, uh, the Khmerian Empire. I, the fact that Jaya Vorman's seventh takes power

at age 60, he rules for over three decades. And I don't want to poke any holes in this mythology because age is, such a, I mean, the way that they were doing things before the common era was just kind of by like the rain and how many years as far as how they would count stuff. We're in the common era at this point. 90 back then feels pretty old.

And maybe that's his relaxed Buddha nature. Maybe that's what it is that's keeping him young. But three decades of rule back then is huge. Three decades of rule by a guy that takes over when he's 60. Yeah. That's really hard to comprehend. And how health it's got lost to bed. He starts cramming in a ton of stuff because he knows he does.

He's not long for this world. So he ends up re-kind of reestablishing the empire. Becomes from an exiled prince to this legendary god king. Again, absolute authority. So he's like, I'm going to go ahead and build what it will be known as the great city. It's going to be called Ankhortham, T-H-O-M. And it's going to be this massive fortified city. We're going to make sure that our capital will never

falls again and it's going to have you know of course the classic moat it's going to have a moat but it's got to be bigger this one has to be completely squared perfectly squared so this is established kind of in the late 12th century it was supposed to be a fortress city spans 3.5 square miles and houses and housed and estimated like 100,000 people within the walls but then is again surrounded by an urban just sprawl that spreads out from it of like different neighborhoods, wooden structures, things like that of like nearly a million people. Part of the reason that he does this is because during his reign, right at the beginning of his reign, after he settles everything down, he institutes my Hayana Buddhism as the de facto state religion. So we're moving away from Hinduism. and he didn't know it at the time,

but this kind of new separation between like there's kings and there's gods. I'm not a king god anymore. I'm the ruler of all I survey but as far as anything up above me, those guys take care of that. It's going to destabilize the empire for future generations.

Because you go from a society of the guy that's been telling us to do all this kind of stuff, we've been under the impression that the entirety of our afterlife is completely dependent on this guy being happy that we were doing stuff. We can't overthrow this guy because he's also got

probably terrifying powers because he's got God in his name. Now he's telling us he's just a king. I mean, we hear stories all the time about bad things happening to kings, right? Kings get overthrown, kings get replaced. And when you do that and you lose that incentive of

this guy does not control everything, not the weather, not the hard, like all of this is just technically it's science that's been able to develop all this shit technically. But yeah, that's going to be a pretty big culture shock. You're,

I know it sounds weird to kind of just kind of bypass it, but you are literally like in these people's eyes, what does that even look like when you're just like, so you're not God? Like, I, for me, this is a, and I heard it so I can't claim it as my own, but it made so much sense.

This is a one-to-one comparison to Christianity in the Roman Empire. This is in the early stages of the Roman Empire after Jesus goes up on the cross Christianity is kind of like a taboo religion that's only practiced in the shadows because you

have the rulers who look down on Christianity and are just attacking it all the time. And then you have a Christian Roman ruler ascend to the throne and Christianity starts taking over because as we were

talking about most of the Hindu people were the statesmen of the upper caste. Whereas you had most of the peasantry who was Buddhist. So now you have a king who's coming to power who's Buddhist and he's saying, hey, we're changing the de facto

religion over to Buddhism. But he doesn't realize what he's doing. He doesn't realize it while at the same time he's emboldening the peasantry because now the whole caste system that was Hindu and looked down upon them for being Buddhist, now they're in the minority. They were in the minority before

but when the god king is Hindu, they're the majority just because... And in that situation, they're then protected de facto under the umbrella of the god king sharing his same religion. Yep. So it's a complete shift. This must be why he builds the city in this manner, because he builds a massive 100 meter wide, so 330 foot wide moat that encircles the city.

So the city in itself, when I say city, this is where like Adam's just talking about. This is where that class of people are living, more of the well-to-dos. outside of this city and on the other side of the moat is where most of the population is actually living. So this thing is completely encircling the city and it runs, I want to say right on the inside of it, there's a 26 foot tall, three kilometer wide, sorry, not three kilometer wide, 26 foot tall, three kilometer long on each side wall that's right there as soon as you get past the moat.

that's reinforced by like a rampart on the other side. So soldiers can just run up the wall and fire down, whatever is coming across. The only place you can come across was these five grand stone gates north, south, east and west. We talked about them earlier. The victory gate that led to the royal palace. So that's an interior gate. The north, south, east and west, of course, this city lines up perfectly to its direction.

It's been planned like that. And that's where you get the four mass. carved stone faces looking out toward the four cardinal directions. Leading up to each gate is a causeway over the moat that's lined with a hundred and eight stone statues. Each gate. One side stands the 54 divas or devas, the gods, and on the other, the 54 Assyras or the demons.

And they're all gripping like the Nogas serpent, because that's part of the mythology. So I'm just trying to kind of like the amount of time and the elaboracy of this. That's just the causeways to get into the city. You're not going to talk about the terrace of the elephants? No, that's, I'm not that far down here, man. I haven't got to the Bayonne yet. Yeah, so just within Ankhortem, it covers 2,225 acres. It's massive.

as Chris was talking about 8 meter high walls on the inside of the moat it's going to be a pretty protected city it's a protected city that's right next to Angor that just got run through by the champ

so not only is he taking part in this building project for Ancourt Tom his own town he's also rebuilding Anchor himself so he has slave labor that's working to rebuild and restore Angor while he's building this Buddhist Ankhort Tomra behind it

and also surrounding it with a massive wall and a massive moat. So instead of just the temple, Ancour Wat being surrounded by the moat and the wall, now we've done it to the whole city because they realize that the champ people didn't mess up Anchor Wat when they showed up. Yeah.

They're like, okay, well, if we just... What's the common out of here? A moat. Yeah. A moat must have been at least some determining factor. If we build the city out of the wall. Yeah. So the exact... geometric or geometric center of Ancourtam sits this thing called the Bayonne and it's his official state temple. So it has these 54 like Gothic.

That's actually the word gothic. When it kind of looks like that, like the little spires and everything that kind of stick up, it does have like a little bit of a gothic feel. I don't think they call it that, but that's what we slapped on it. Yeah. It's Camarian, I guess. But then there's like these 200 massive stone faces that are carved. this is where they think that when he was carving this, this is where you also get to see the changeover

and you get to see some like Buddhist deities that are being carved into this now as well. So this is almost like, do you feel like he started carving this because the other city was more dedicated to Hinduism and its story and everything like that? And now he's also building this. He's like, I can't just scrape all that shit off the walls

or anything like that. It's better, I'm just going to start over again. We'll keep those two. They're really awesome, but we'll start building this one. I think part of the reason that he did it is because this Mahayana Buddhism is a very flexible religion. So is this Buddhism is spreading. We're going to talk about another form that it's pretty strict. It's pretty rigid as far as their beliefs go. But this Mayha'ianan Buddhism is a lot of, once we show up to an area, we're not going to change any of the local.

culture. We're going to ingratiate ourselves by accepting those things into our religion so we don't feel as I guess... We're not lording over them. We're not going to take anything away. We're just going to give them an extra if they want it and everyone can do their own thing.

So one of the things, and this was my next note, so I don't know why I didn't just read it. So the outer walls had like miles of these hyper detailed like carvings. So Ancor Wat basically like we were talking about focuses on the mythology. This one actually was the one that had the historical retelling. So this served as like

the depictions of events that actually happened. You got like the naval battle against the champ because that had just happened, of course. You would get everyday like scenes of soldiers cooking. There was there's been ones that they've seen that are depicting like cockfights. You would see markets. So it kind of looks like it was also telling about the daily life of the citizens that were actually living there. So it. It was more of like a historical, I guess, text. There's also a, I guess you would call it a juxtaposition with the, with Anchor Wat. Anchor Wat being a temple, a Hindu temple, was surrounded by a wall, a wall for protection.

That's true. And you're also saying temple. This wasn't a temple. There was a temple in the middle of it, but the walls outside are telling the story of the city. Well, the Bayonne, the Buddhist temple that's inside there has no walls protecting the temple. So the Hindu people protected their temple from Buddhists that they didn't want coming into their temple. The Buddhist didn't create a security wall because they were fine with everybody going into their temple. Gotcha.

There's no kind of form of protectionism as far as like, this is just ours. The construction itself is a message about the religion. Yeah. It's an open religion that's showing them, hey, we accept a. everybody. Um, like you were saying, Terrace of the Elephants, this 350 meter long viewing platform that was decorated like with relief carvings of elephants. This is where basically when they were marching back from war, from, from conquest,

bringing back the spoils, the king would stand here to, to oversee them returning to the city. What have you brought me? Well, inside the city, it's used for royal viewings. It's where the king is sitting as they're going through and doing these parades, these public ceremonies. I imagine that it has to be that tall so you don't get like an elephant trunk swing that accidentally knocks you off as the elephants are marching through. Oh, I think it's a pretty, pretty high.

That's what I mean. If you were lower, if you were at like eye level with a 12 foot tall elephant, he swings that trunk up, all of a sudden king's up and over the wall. Yes. It's like a baseball bat. Just smugging a baseball. We actually lost one of our kings that way. They also, and this is, again, this is just how open they were.

There was this other thing inside there, or inside Ankhortam called the Bufoon. It's this three-tiered temple mountain that's dedicated to the Hindu god of Shiva. So we're not only building just strictly Buddhist things. We're still building Hindu temples inside of Ankhortem because we know that not everybody that's coming into the city is going to be Buddhist, we want them to feel free to worship their gods well, so knowing that our state religion is just Buddhism. Well, and what's crazy too is this is kind of a transition as well, where behind the terraces, the palace itself is actually built of wood because they made that transition to where only the gods were allowed to live in stone as being something of the change.

So while the terrace and all that kind of still exists and everything and the Bayonne does, the palace just rotted away with the rest of all the surrounding area. The only thing that still stands to that, I think, is there was this stone intrigate and then the royal swimming pool that still remains. Yeah, this guy was, he was the builder king. Building Angkor, huge deal. This guy restored Angkor, built Angkor Thom, then went on to build over 100 hospitals that were distributed uniformly across the empire.

They provided free medical care. They were always stocked and staffed by trained attendants. Trained for the time. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what trained looks like. He also expanded the road system into this just unified network leading to all the cities that had bridges. They had raised causeways. And then along those roads, he built 121 resthouses that were every 9 to 15 miles apart. So just like we were talking about the Roman roads, just like every everything.

that was going on in the West. He's doing over here. These rest houses had fireplaces in them. They were always stocked with provisions. It was a place that you could stop in rest as you're going along. Accumended Empire using that type of stuff for the postal service to get around.

There's just, there's so many places where this pops up and I have to wonder kind of, I mean, that has to be an understanding. Is that something that you just come upon naturally because it's kind of common sense that you would want that for efficiency? Or do you think that that was something that they heard from the West.

I don't know. I don't know if you just get to a point when you're doing so well as a civilization that when you're reaching your peak, you're just like, we can just afford to take care of all of these like little things that will make life more convenient and that benefit everyone, which is a, yeah, worth it. I also don't know if they're available to everyone. They could have been just for rich people. And they could have been another way to make income for that, for the empire. That's true. So I don't know what to what degree is it. But when you get to a civilization that's been this successful, it, it.

is obviously able to take care of its people. It has to keep them fed because it knows it needs to build all this shit and they've got to have a labor force to do it. It gets to a point when its biggest strength ends up becoming its biggest weakness. So, I mean, unless we have anything before that, you want to talk about how it starts kind of teeter and off? Yeah. A lot of kind of the down swing follows these reins from 1243 on

because there's so much more pressure. from the public that we're getting tired of this constant yo-yo of religions from Buddhism to Hinduism back to King Jaya Varmine the 8th who reintroduces Hinduism in 1243 like I was saying and begins converting or just heavily defacing all of these Buddhist temples. He is hardline Hindu. He's going to get rid of all of these beautiful structures, these beautiful ornate structures, And a lot of them, I believe they said around the Bayonne and in Ankhortem was a lot of Jaya Varm in the 7th faces that were carved in there. So he was going through and desecrating these Buddhist temples with Jaya Varm in the 7th face on as Jaya Varm in the 8th.

That was the royal name that you decided to take knowing that the previous one to you was very hardcore Buddhist. But this switch back to Hinduism shows the more. violent side of it and I didn't look into it. I'm sure that Eastern religions are very similar to Western religions that there's just different sex of Buddhism. There's different sex of Hinduism. Okay, so

is part of that Jai Varm in the 8th? Is it his son? I don't think it is because he comes to power in 1243. So maybe a nephew. I'm not either way. A great-grandson, maybe. A grandson. Yeah. So either way,

what he's basically trying to do is he has seen Jaya Varmin the 7th still have this thing going on where people aren't viewing him as a God. Do you think the reason he tries to switch this back to Hinduism is he's like, I got to get back in God mode. I got to have them looking back. Like he's seen some like rumblings. He's got his hand to the pulse. He's like, these people aren't respecting us anymore. He's like, we need to be gods again.

And the only way we're able to do that, I can't pull that shit if they're all Buddhists. I got to switch the shit back to Hindu. I think that there's a lot of that. I also think that once you sort of break the illusion, as far as like you not being tied to the afterlife for your subjects. You're not the gatekeeper? Yeah, there's less of a, I guess, there's less of a desire to pay your taxes.

There's less of a desire for you to go out on these public works projects. And slowly over time through just less income coming in, more pressing issues, building projects start to slow. And we get kind of the best look as far as a primary source for everyday lives of the residents in 1296. There's a Chinese diplomat named Jodawa, or Dagoan that visits Angkor. He writes about the empire. and you can kind of see in late 13th century what's going on inside of Angkor where it's not necessarily at its peak.

We've already seen its peak. We saw it raised to the ground. Then we saw it brought back to life given this extra growth of Angkor Tom on the side of it. The empire has gone through multiple changes in religion. So really what the... the writings that we're getting from this Chinese diplomat are is kind of like a

this is where they went. They reached the mountaintop and then somehow we're able to fuck that up. They were able to split the populace along religious lines and then tried to reinstate this hardline Hinduism

when everybody else already realizes that it's kind of a farce. So you have the ability as a god king that if you wanted to build a new we need another beret let's go dig another one it's your religious duty as subjects of the god king to go do that you shut your mouth you got there you make the berms and it fills with water if something were to happen as far as like a public works disaster where oh shit one of the sides eroded and it's spilling everything and it's destroying everything as a god king you say stop what you're doing your god king commands you

go fix it. Everyone goes out there, rushes, it gets done because you have access to that, that instantaneous command. When you don't have that anymore, you no longer have that absolute authority to command hundreds of thousands of people to do immediate backbreaking labor that puts themselves in danger. Because these people with a God King are willing to just throw their lives in here. And it's like, do you need this to throw bodies in the hole to block it up while other guys fill it in with dirt? Like, we do that. Now it's to the point where it's just like, yeah, we're going to need to start talking about hazard pay before we start shoveling dirt into this gap. And it's this, you know, as the shift tries to go back to this God can think, people are like, yeah, but we don't want to throw our bodies in the gap anymore.

We don't want to go back to that. And you can't make us because if we tell you, no, we're not condemned to whatever Hindu hell is. So you also get weather. weather starts working against them because it's not just a case of oh it gets dry for a little bit because we've been prepared for that and it gets dry we got this these all of these reservoirs that we can actually use but when you get you know when there's generational things that happen like this is a 50 year drought or this is you get stuff that happens over the course of thousands of years where you might get a drought that lasts i don't know like 15 years

and no one can prepare for that because that's never happened in the history of anyone's lifetime or anyone's heard about well it happens in a way to where there is like and Cambodia experiences these crazy like climate whiplash scenarios where you'll have decades

of like intense multi-year droughts sporadic with a little bit of monsoons but then all of a sudden when the monsoons return and they return just in crazy amounts because of the drastic swing the other direction. If you have areas that have dried up that haven't been being maintained

because there hasn't been needs so when you have these berets and everything like that, the canals that haven't been in use, all of that water that then gets dumped on that area, what does it do when it's on dry ground? It doesn't soak in. It just fucking flash floods. It charges in and yeah, it might fill these

berets really quickly and everything, but then what's to stop it from overflowing? Once it overflows for a little bit, then it just floods everything because it's still hard pat ground, but then as it softens and you still have water flow over dirt and erosion, it just all of a sudden starts carving gullies and stuff like that. So like the sudden rush of water into these areas start like destroying the entire canal system. And again, it's not to a point where it's like, hey, I can command all these people to just go fix all this stuff. It's just, it's degrading. You also have a, the reason why we're going to talk about kind of so many factors here is because by 1327,

the last known Sanskrit inscriptions are recorded for the empire. So now we're just relying on external sources that are coming in or what we can. You just talked about things like that. Yeah, what we can see from the archaeological record, core samples or anything like that. So at that point in time, the practice of Theravada Buddhism had dominated Hinduism and the Mahayana Buddhism. It was favored by a lot of different people in the empire because the monks made vows of poverty. They couldn't even touch any sort of currency or anything like that, which they were starting to use. as far as like trade or anything or gold.

Is this like mugs in like the orange that I'm thinking of usually wearing the orange robes, things like that? They don't get to live in these lavish temples anymore. They don't get to basically eat all the fruits of everybody else's later. They're poking it up. They're pushed into poverty. They are forced to live among the population in grass huts.

They have to go. All men of God should. Yeah. They have to go on pilgrimage. Man of God. These pilgrimages. You are not living in a mega mansion. Yeah, these aren't evangelical monks.

They have to go basically on these food tours because they're relying on the populace to feed them, which empowers the populace more because they're saying, well, now we're not being looked down upon by these monks and by the church. They're equals or under us. And they think that for about the last hundred years of the empire, this is when you start. to see the depopulation of Angkor. And we talked about it a lot during the Mayan episode because we have these giant Mayan megacities, I guess in their scale,

80 to 100,000 people that are living in these cities that just kind of seemed like they were, the people disappeared. And it really wasn't that they disappeared. It was because of all those slash and burn practices rendered those cities uninhabitable, so they moved off into the forest. Yeah, and it's just a combination of these things

kind of happening in, very quick succession. So all it would take, if you're thinking about Ancor, so you have Ancor Thaum, you have Ancor Watt, you have the entire Ancor complex, all of that is essentially being fed by these reservoirs that are around here. If that entire area were to go ahead and flood and have a very, very damaging flood, it's not like you can just turn around and be like, okay, are we okay? There has to be a portion of that population that responds to whatever the damages of that flood are. So if they lost the ability to irrigate and to do more than two harvests or something like that, all of those people who aren't going to be being fed now need to go somewhere else. And at this point, this is a rare circumstance of an inland, not really a place that doesn't have access or a maritime type like projection is still successful.

But when something happens, like I said, Glass Cannon very successful until it gets hit by something hard. Yeah. All those people that have to leave, then leave for the coast and leave for the areas where there's larger populations, which at this point in history, is still going to be very coastal and dependent on the sea. And then when the population reduces, what happens to even an available workforce of volunteers, that goes way down too. You can't repair it. So it's just this slow, you know, relatively not historical speaking, but like over the course of decades, just this slow death, this withering. of these areas. And it's not like people are slashing and burning.

They're not destroying the temples. They're probably not caring for them very much. But no one's leaving because this place got burned to the ground and destroyed. It just simply wasn't a viable place to live anymore and people migrated away from it. And then the jungle came in and was like, I guess this is ours now. If you have a hundred thousand people that are regularly employed to keep up on this canal system inside of Angor or Angkor. and then you have a quarter of that population move away and you only have 75,000 of that workforce

that's able to maintain this canal system, you're only going to be able to cover 75% of the canal system being maintained and repaired. So as that's falling into disrepair and we're going to talk about some of these just massive dry stretches that they get that are followed up by these crazy monsoons, silt's going to start filling up into those canals, you're going to start getting a breakdown of the moneymaker for the empire

inside of Angkor. And before we can even get to that, the main thing that kind of draw, I would say the main thing, just because war is usually the main thing of any of this. But you see this rise of the Ayutthaya Empire, or Ayataya Kingdom, which is now modern day Thailand.

And it begins all of these incursions into the Khmer Kingdom and this happens as there's uprisings around the empire already. So they're slowly killing the power of the kings because you're going through civil war while you're getting punched at. They said that of the 27 kings that ruled over Cambusia, which was Cambodia now, there was only about 11 of them that had, or there was 11 of them that had no legitimate claim to the throne.

So almost half of these kings that go on, don't have a legitimate claim to it, which means that they rose to power through unscrupulous means. And this starts to get concentrated towards the end of the empire, which then causes a spiral. So in 1352,

Thailand besieges Angkor, they take it within the next year, and all of a sudden, all these Thai princes are ruling the city. It's very hard to keep a city in a place that's as proud as a Khmer Empire. 1357, they lose.

the throne to an uprising. Then the Ithine king besieges Angkor again, captures it again the following year. I believe that was 1358 and then 1359. Short time, they rule over Cambusia, so all of Cambodia, not just Angkor at that time. The prince that they brought in to rule over all of Cambodia gets assassinated, brings power back to the Khmer, up until 1431. when finally this is the last time that Ancourt gets sacked. It forces, I don't even know,

this is how far off the beaten path of the Surjavas that they've gone. This guy's name is King Ponya Yat. So they're just not even doing the Varna. Well, this is, it's this new form of strict Buddhism that's not flexible enough to keep any of the Varmine name. He ends up abandoning the city. He moves the capital near to where now modern

day, Phnom Penh is where the capital of Cambodia is now. There's so many factors that go into it besides the military pressure. The economic shift is a major one because the maritime trade industry is booming. So these inland empires that you were talking about in the beginning of the whole episode, before we started talking about the Khmer Empire, if you're moving towards the sea, this trade that's going on between India and China through there, you're going to be able to sell your where is better on the coast. New War inland.

And it's not only just about you selling your stuff. If ships are coming in and all of that trade is then driving your stuff out as well, the stuff you're bringing in, they're not going to sail any further than they have to. Fuck, if the reason they're selling this far is because this is the closest place that will buy this stuff and given the best price, they're not going a mile further than they have to. So to expect them to then go up the Mekong and then potentially go up the, fuck, I forgot the name of the river now.

the tonal tonal whatever it was but to go up there to then deal with them no they're not going to be doing that there was a time when it just wasn't as important to have that maritime access and it comes to

again this place just existed in such a sweet spot and thrived for such a long time but it was just because conditions were very right for it I guess and that time was not to last forever. No, and they also had the ability to go up and down the Mekong, so they were able to get the inland trade,

but when that's not as necessary anymore, and you have these major centers of population that are on the coastline because of it, you've got to get with the times. You've got to be able to move it. I think that what you were talking about earlier, this environmental instability is it's so kind of perfect for what's going on.

as far as the downfall goes. The 14th into the 15th centuries, I believe they, from what I heard, we haven't never talked about the Little Ice Age. I think we've brought it up a couple times, but it was a cooling pattern that went on in the 14th and 15th centuries. And they were getting through cutting down trees and looking at the tree rings. I believe that in drought, tree rings get much tighter. Yeah, and then they're thicker in the wet years.

Yeah. So they were able to surmise that they had these back-to-back 10-year severe droughts. And in between these 10-year severe droughts, they had these torrential monsoons. And when these droughts are happening, it's silting up all of these canals. They're getting all of the very little runoff that's coming in is pushing so much other dirt and minerals and shit into the canals. So it was all everything all kind of caused. So whenever you get the access to control. control this water and you can move it around anywhere, you're clear-cutting a lot of area,

flat area that you can then turn into area for rice patties, things like that. What happens when you run into situations of drought and then everything dries on top and then it gets washed away in sudden monsoons, there's nothing to stop the soil erosion. So all of that stuff coming down from these areas that you've clear-cut is now just choking these areas that are supposed to be directing the water and farming the water, they're choked up. And as they get choked up, you don't have enough of a workforce to then clear them out or to force people to clear them out. So when it finally comes down for a huge monsoon, a once in a thousand-year monsoon, it's not like, hey, we have these five-foot deep channels that are, you know, sending that'll divert water or anything like that. These berets can't withstand it.

And they start to like part of the levees and everything like that start to break. and then it just pretty much floods everything and because of all of the silt that's built up it's not funneling the water. It's just sweeping over everything. And again, all it takes is one crazy or two crazy years where people are like,

we got to get the fuck out of here. You lose a portion of your population and there's a strong, you know, what am I trying to say? Enemy or rival or something like that right next to you and they're just coming into their own like Thailand was, that's all it takes is timing for it to work out.

Your enemy's weakened. They're in, you know, they can't even rebuild at this point. This is when we strike. Sometimes your brilliance can undo you. Because part of the brilliance of the hydraulic system in this hydraulic city that they had in Angkor was if they needed water to flow slowly, they would build meandering canals to slow the flow of water.

You need a river and how a river can flow, yeah. Whereas if you needed direct water, you would make everything a lot straighter. Uh-huh. So in these times of drought, they did a very smart thing, and they dug these canals out to the mountains that led directly into the city. So that way, you don't have to have a whole bunch of extra water, and everything is rushing straight to the source. Now, when these droughts end, and you have these massive torrential monsoons that sit in between these droughts, if those are the only canal gates that are open, that means that. that all of that torrential rain is going to be flowing directly into your city from these straight canals. So you knew what to do during drought, but by the time you had to switch over to the meandering canals to bring the water in slowly.

It's too late. It's too late. So it's flooding the city. And there were parts of the, there's parts of the city now. This just shows you how far away they got away from the Hindu temples and just these sacred sites is there was a bridge that had been blown out over one of these straight canals. and they actually rebuilt it by tearing away parts of the temple to use on the bridge. And you can tell because of the inscriptions on the... Oh, shit. The stones that are used on the bridge now were part of the inscriptions on the side of a temple that they had pulled off. So it ends up being in more than one way. Again, their advancement is their downfall.

They were so reliant on the water thing that if something went wrong with that, it would... The wheels fell off. But then when they were going to be invaded, Their network of roads and all of that that may travel throughout and commerce throughout their empire so quick and so convenient was the same highway that carried in the hostile troops in their moments of weakness. You don't need a roadmap of war when all roads lead to somewhere that you can sack. Exactly, yeah. There's, I guess, a ton of old Angkor artifacts sitting in Thailand. Like they just, they raided the shit out of this place and have held it for hundreds of years.

Oh, of course. And much like the Mayan population, this isn't like the Khmer Empire disappeared. Even though the empire disintegrated, modern-day Cambodians are direct linguistic, cultural, and genetic descendants of the people that built the Khmer Empire. So the Khmer Empire didn't go away. It just ceased to be the Khmer Empire and the people that made it. the Khmer Empire continued to come into modern-day Cambodia. Yeah. And for as insane as this is, it's Cambodia has so much more because I believe they don't end up gaining their independence.

I think they were a colonial holding of France. And I think World War II is what freed them up. And as they gain their independence, they had this time between the, then in 1970 so between 1945, 46, whenever they became a free state up until 1970

that they had their own kind of path of self-determination. Well, what's going on in Vietnam right next door? You have the Vietnam War. You have communism that's coming in and basically you have the United States and other world powers

looking at Cambodia and be like, hey, no communist shit going on over here. We're already fighting up this thin peninsula of land over here in Vietnam or this thin stretch of land. We don't want to have to come in here and drop some napalm on you guys too. We have some incursions that we'll talk about during the Vietnam War that go into Cambodia. But then you fast forward to 1970 and Pol Pot comes to power. Pol Pot's one of the nastiest dictators of all time.

He ushers in a government called the Khmer Rouge, the Red Khmer Empire that he's trying to bring back. and as he's trying to bring back the Khmer Empire, he is moving all of these people out of the city into an agrarian lifestyle to try to basically replicate what they had done before. But you can't go back in time and the famines that they face end up killing about 25% of the population of Cambodia

between 2 and 3 million people. So an empire that was once the greatest empire in the world when they tried to do part two under nasty dictatorship ends up seeing a quarter of the population lost by their own leader. So what you're saying is we may be revisiting Cambodia come Christmas time when we normally do our very happy worst fucking bastards of history type stuff. Yeah, Pol Pot, my...

History's biggest assholes. I think we're kind of committed at that point now. Oh, yeah. All right, man. You got anything else? I'm glad that we got back to old empires, ancient empires These are so much fun And it's so cool to be able to look back at history

Like I say We didn't learn about this in school We know we're so This is hiding in fucking Cambodia Like we're just going to dig a little bit deeper Find a few more of these yeah Yeah there's gonna be plenty of these Asian empires That we get to learn about

All right well we hope you guys enjoyed The episode this week And we'll catch you next time Peace