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The City of Angkor Died a Slow Death

Accepted submission by Phoenix666 at 2019-02-28 05:31:16
Science

ArsTechnica [arstechnica.com]:

In the early Middle Ages, nearly one out of every thousand people in the world lived in Angkor, the sprawling capital of the Khmer Empire in present-day Cambodia. But by the 1500s, Angkor had been mostly abandoned—its temples, citadels, and complex irrigation network left to overgrowth and ruin. Recent studies have blamed a period of unstable climate [arstechnica.com] in which heavy floods followed lengthy droughts, which broke down the infrastructure that moved water around the massive city.

But it turns out Angkor’s waterworks may have been vulnerable to these changes because there was no one left to maintain and repair them. A new study suggests that Khmer rulers, religious officials, and city administrators had been steadily flowing out of Angkor to other cities for at least a century before the end.

They should have given the Sewer Workers Local the raise they were asking for.


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