The Khmer Empire

The Khmer Empire was a hydraulic monarchy in mainland Southeast Asia, founded when Jayavarman II declared himself a universal monarch in 802 CE and centered from the late ninth century onward on the temple city of Angkor, in present-day Cambodia. At its height in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries the empire ruled or held as vassals most of mainland Southeast Asia, reaching north into southern China, and built the temple complexes of Angkor Wat and the Bayon atop an extensive network of reservoirs and canals. The empire's decline in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is attributed to a combination of causes still debated among historians: repeated sieges by the Ayutthaya Kingdom, a shift from the royal Hindu devaraja cult toward Theravada Buddhism that undercut the ideological basis of god-kingship, and a severe drought following a period of intense monsoon rains that damaged the hydraulic infrastructure the empire depended on. Angkor was abandoned as the capital after an Ayutthayan siege in 1431. The empire's economy was built on wet-rice agriculture, sustained by a vast hydraulic system of canals and barays, immense reservoirs that stored monsoon rainfall for irrigation and helped Angkor support an estimated population of seven hundred thousand to nine hundred thousand people at its thirteenth century peak, among the largest pre-industrial urban settlements known. Court and religious life used two written languages side by side: Old Khmer for administrative and everyday inscriptions and Sanskrit for religious dedications. The Old Khmer script itself was adapted from the Pallava script of southern India, which had spread through Southeast Asia in the fifth and sixth centuries CE and ultimately descended from Tamil-Brahmi; the oldest dated Khmer inscription, found at Angkor Borei, is dated to 611 CE. Angkor had never been entirely forgotten by the Khmer or by the wider region, but the French naturalist Henri Mouhot's 1860 account brought the ruins to wide Western attention, and Angkor was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992.