Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderHydraulic architecture fact

Angkor, capital of the Khmer Empire in today's Cambodia from the ninth to the fifteenth century, was ringed by giant reservoirs, moats and canals that stored monsoon rain and moved water across an urban area of about 1,000 square kilometres.

Angkor hydraulic system

ArchitectureEngineeringClimateArchaeologyCultureHistoryTechnology

The story behind the card

The largest reservoirs, called barays, are vast rectangles banked with earth: the West Baray, built in the eleventh century, measures about eight kilometres by two and still holds water. Moats such as the one around Angkor Wat framed temples modelled on the sacred mountain and surrounding oceans of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. Radar and aerial surveys published in 2007, and airborne laser scanning (lidar) that saw through the forest in 2012, revealed roads, canals and house mounds across at least 1,000 square kilometres, the largest known pre-industrial settlement. Researchers still debate how much the barays watered rice fields. Tree rings show long droughts broken by intense monsoons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which damaged the network and probably contributed to Angkor's decline.

Türkçe oku
Angkor, 9. ile 15. yüzyıllar arasında bugünkü Kamboçya'da Khmer İmparatorluğu'nun başkentiydi. Kentin dev rezervuarları, hendekleri ve kanalları muson yağmurlarını biriktirir, suyu yaklaşık 1.000 kilometrekareye yayılan kent alanında dolaştırırdı.

En büyük rezervuarlara baray denir; toprak setlerle çevrili dev dikdörtgenlerdir. 11. yüzyılda yapılan Batı Baray yaklaşık sekize iki kilometre boyutundadır ve bugün hâlâ su tutar. Angkor Vat'ı çevreleyen hendek gibi su yapıları, Hindu ve Budist evren tasavvurundaki kutsal dağı ve onu saran okyanusları canlandıran tapınakları çerçeveliyordu. 2007'de yayımlanan radar ve hava araştırmaları ile 2012'de ormanın altını görebilen havadan lazer taramaları (lidar), en az 1.000 kilometrekarelik bir alanda yolları, kanalları ve ev tümseklerini ortaya çıkardı. Bu, bilinen en büyük sanayi öncesi yerleşimdir. Barayların pirinç tarlalarını ne ölçüde suladığı hâlâ tartışılıyor. Ağaç halkaları, 14. ve 15. yüzyıllarda uzun kuraklıkların şiddetli musonlarla bölündüğünü gösteriyor; bu aşırılıklar su ağına zarar verdi ve büyük olasılıkla Angkor'un gerilemesinde rol oynadı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Angkor Wat
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderArchitecture

Petra, the rock-carved city of the Nabataeans in southern Jordan, could thrive in the desert thanks to its water engineering: channels, dams, cisterns and reservoirs that caught springs, rain and flash floods.

The Nabataeans were an Arab people who grew rich from the caravan trade in incense and spices, and Petra was their capital. The city was at its height around the 1st century AD, until Rome annexed the kingdom in AD 106. In a region that gets only about 15 centimetres of rain a year, its channels, dams, tunnels and cisterns stored water through the dry months; the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the system supplied 30,000 to 40,000 people. As trade routes shifted and earthquakes struck, the city declined. The Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, travelling in disguise, brought it to European attention in 1812. UNESCO listed it in 1985.

PetraRead card
WonderArchaeology

Skara Brae, a village on Orkney off the north coast of Scotland, was built about 5,000 years ago, and its stone houses still hold their beds, hearths and dressers. It is one of the best-preserved Neolithic, or New Stone Age, villages in Europe.

Built in stone around 3180 BC and lived in for perhaps 600 years, Skara Brae is older than Stonehenge's famous stone circle and Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza. A storm in 1850 stripped away the sand dune that had buried the village, revealing houses linked by covered passageways, each with a stone hearth, box beds and a dresser for displaying possessions, all built from slabs because Orkney has little timber. The archaeologist V. Gordon Childe carried out the first scientific excavations in the 1920s. The site now forms part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site, alongside the Ring of Brodgar and the Standing Stones of Stenness, two nearby stone circles from the same era.

Skara BraeRead card
WonderEngineering

A qanat is an underground channel, developed in ancient Persia, that brings groundwater from the foot of hills to fields and towns using gravity alone. From above, a qanat shows as a line of shaft openings across dry land.

Builders start with a 'mother well' dug down to the water table, then cut a tunnel back towards the surface on a very gentle slope, so the water flows without wearing away the channel. Vertical shafts along the route let workers lift out soil, bring in air and later clean the tunnel. The Qasabeh qanat at Gonabad in eastern Iran, dated to between 700 and 500 BCE, has a mother well more than 360 metres deep and about 33 kilometres of channels, and still carries water. In 2016 UNESCO listed eleven Iranian qanats together as a World Heritage site, recognising both the engineering and the old customs for sharing the water fairly.

Qanat water systemsRead card
WonderEngineering

The Pont du Gard in southern France is a three-tier Roman bridge, 48.8 metres high, built to carry the aqueduct that supplied Nîmes across the Gardon River while keeping the very slight downhill slope that let water flow by gravity alone.

The aqueduct ran about 50 kilometres from a spring near Uzès to Nîmes, yet dropped only about 12.6 metres over its whole length, an average of some 25 centimetres per kilometre. The bridge's lower arches span the river, and a row of small arches on top carries the covered water channel. It is the tallest Roman aqueduct bridge still standing. Most historians date it to the first century AD, possibly the reign of Claudius. After the aqueduct fell out of use, around the sixth century, the bridge served for centuries as a road crossing, and parts of its second tier were cut away to let carts through. Napoleon III ordered a major restoration in the 1850s, and UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1985.

Pont du GardRead card
WonderTrade

The Incense Route carried frankincense and myrrh, fragrant tree resins, from southern Arabia to Mediterranean markets for centuries, through a chain of caravan towns, wells, forts and water systems across the desert.

Frankincense and myrrh come from trees that grow in the dry lands of southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa. They were burned in temples and homes, and used in medicine, perfume and embalming. Pliny the Elder, writing his Natural History around AD 77, says the road from Thomna in southern Arabia to Gaza on the Mediterranean was divided into 65 camel stages, and that by the coast each camel-load had cost 688 denarii in water, fodder, lodging, tolls and payments to priests, guards and officials. Cities that controlled parts of the route grew rich, among them Shabwa in Yemen and the Nabataean capital Petra in today's Jordan, whose cisterns and dams stored scarce rain for the caravans.

Incense RouteRead card
Next card in the archiveThe eleven churches of Lalibela in northern Ethiopia were carved out of solid volcanic rock in the Middle Ages, each shaped from the top down inside deep trenches, and they are still a place of pilgrimage for Ethiopian Christians.Read next →