8.9.2 Why was Angkor abandoned? From 1352, the Khmer suffered attacks by the Tai kingdom of Ayutthaya. For a while, the Khmer Empire remained powerful but in the 1440s the Khmer rulers abandoned Angkor. The most widely accepted explanation is the one put by Milton Osborne. He stated that the Tais ‘threatened and eventually damaged the agricultural system upon which Angkor’s very existence depended’. But this may not have been the only reason for Angkor’s collapse. Several other hypotheses have been advanced to explain why Angkor was abandoned. Environmental damage One theory suggests that environmental damage may have played a role as forests were cut down to clear land for more rice fields. This resulted in topsoil being carried by floods into the barays and canals, causing them to silt up and flood. Once this happened, there would have been flooding in the wet season and water shortages in the dry season. The population might have been afflicted with malaria. In any case, Angkor would no longer have been able to support its large population.
SOURCE3 The base of the Hindu temple called the Eastern Mebon is guarded by carved figures of elephants. The temple is on an island in the Eastern Baray, one of two giant water reservoirs that were created to provide year-round water for farming. The barays were created by building huge dykes to hold floodwaters.
The Black Death It has been suggested that the Black Death (bubonic plague) could have been a factor in Angkor’s decline. The plague, which killed many millions in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, appears to have originated in Mongolia and central China in the early 1300s and it is known to have spread west along trade routes, including the Silk Road. Although the plague appears in reports from several parts of Asia from the 1330s and it could possibly have reached Cambodia from China, there is no hard evidence of it visiting the Khmer Empire. Climate change Another theory suggests that climate change could have caused a shortage of water during the ‘Little Ice Age’. This was a period of lower global temperatures.
Jacaranda Humanities Alive 8 Victorian Curriculum Third Edition
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator