The Angkorian Period

The Angkorian Period, 802 to 1431 CE, spans the height of the Khmer Empire in what is now Cambodia, beginning when King Jayavarman II declared himself a universal monarch and unified the region's Khmer polities and ending with the abandonment of the capital following repeated Ayutthayan Siamese invasions. Successive Khmer god-kings built an extraordinary sequence of temple-mountains at their capital of Angkor, culminating in Angkor Wat, constructed under Suryavarman II in the early twelfth century as a vast Hindu temple later converted to Buddhist use and today the largest religious monument in the world, and in the Bayon temple with its enormous serene stone faces, built under Jayavarman VII, the empire's most prolific builder and last great ruler, around 1200. Angkor's power rested substantially on a sophisticated network of reservoirs and canals that supported intensive rice agriculture and a population some scholars estimate reached three-quarters of a million, making it among the largest pre-industrial urban settlements anywhere in the world. Environmental strain on this water system, combined with military pressure and a shift toward Theravada Buddhism that undercut the god-king ideology, contributed to the empire's decline and the capital's abandonment by the mid-fifteenth century.