Announcer

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, from HowStuffWorks.com.

Katie

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I’m Katie Lambert.

Sara: And I’m Sara Dowdy. And if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you know how much Katie and I love a good lost city. We’ve talked about Atlantis recently, and a little while before that we talked about the Notchico in South America. So these cities that disappear or empires that appear out of nowhere and then disappear again seem to fascinate us.

Katie

So today we’re going to do the lost city of Angkor. And when Sara said this earlier, it was like, “Oh, you want to talk about Angkor Wat.” And she said, “No, there’s a lot more to it than that.

Sara

Yeah, that’s just one temple Katie.

Katie

So today it’s ruins and peasants who grow rice in northwestern Cambodia, that’s what you think of when you’re thinking of Angkor Wat, but back in medieval times it was something else.

Sara

It was a very impressive, very huge city, with a lot of amazing works of engineering. But what went wrong?

Katie

Well, to do that, let’s start out with a little bit of background on Angkor which starts in A.D. 800, and Sara was saying it’s lovely to be able to start with one person instead of whole groups.

Sara

The people from this river came. It’s nice to have one warrior type guy come into the picture early on.

Katie

And in this case it’s a powerful regional king named Jayavarman II.

Sara

And Jayavarman consolidated the chiefdoms in Cambodia, and he formed the kingdom of Angkor, and he’s the one who decides that the Khmer royalty, the Cambodian royalty, would be linked to the Gods, creating the cult of the devajara, which is literally the God King, or King of the Gods. So this proves to be a very important part of our story, this close relationship between the Kings and the Gods and the monuments they would build both to themselves and to the Gods.

Katie

Right, and Angkor is his capital, the capital of the Khmer, or Cambodian Empire, from the 9th Century to the 15th Century A.D. which is known as the Classical Era of Cambodian history.

Sara

And we are going to have a little bit of river people descendant thing. We started with the King, but the people were descended from the Funan or the Mekong Delta and the Khmer empire is highly influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism and that comes from centuries old contact with Indian traders, but they still retain some of their traditional religions. They kind of blended it all together.