Waterworks in Cambodia

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

At the mention of Cambodia, most people come up with the name of the Angkor Wat temple complex. In fact, there are several cultural monuments of the past in this area: Angkor Thom, Bayon, Ta Prohm, Phnom Bakheng, etc. Angkor Wat is the most famous temple complex visited by tourists. But few people pay attention to no less mysterious and even more fantastic structures, or rather hydraulic structures: reservoirs with the local name of barai.

At one time I laid out articleabout them. But since then, no one has raised this topic. Recently they sent a link to the video:

The author also asked questions about the possibility of the ancients to dig such a reservoir. Even within the time frame of the history of this region, the figure turns out to be unreal, it takes more than 1000 years of manual labor.

I propose to look again at these places in space images and from a height and return to the version that I proposed in my time in the livejournal.

Coordinates: 13 ° 26'04.8 ″ N 103 ° 48'28.0 ″ E Source: google maps

Historians do not like to talk about huge artificial reservoirs next to a group of temples, much less discuss them. This is not surprising. Because the discussions are striking a lot of questions.

The dimensions of the reservoir are 8000 m by 2100 m and a depth of 5 m. It contained up to 80 million cubic meters of water. West Baray is the largest Cambodian baray.

View from above. This is perhaps the largest artificial reservoir of ancient civilizations. Longitudinal orientation: modern west-east.

View of the western bar from a height, covering the entire reservoir. Huge scale.

Despite the huge size of the bar, its geometry and binding to the cardinal points are well maintained. The work was clearly supervised by ancient surveyors.

There are channels from the bar. But they are not like irrigation ones. They are like transport links that connect the ponds of the temple to the bar. Now this channel is silted up, but it can be seen in space images.

Scheme of water channels only part of this territory

Angkor Wat. The width of the canals is about 200m. Length - 1.5 km

News sometimes appears on the Internet that another ancient temple has been found in the jungle of Cambodia. The jungle has a small area there. Everything else is fields. The area outside Angkor is densely populated. And it is not difficult to search in a limited area in the jungle, unlike, for example, Ecuador or Brazil. Perhaps everything has been known for a long time and this is done to attract the attention of tourists.

Eastern bar. Much smaller than the western one. Dimensions: 3500m x 850m. In the jungle I found a body of water in the form of a human image. Size: about 450x450m

And to the south of it, apparently, there is another, but silted bar:

Dimensions 7x1, 7cm

West of Angkor there is also a number of temple complexes, previously surrounded by water moats, canals

If you think about all this large-scale construction, then questions arise:

1. Why were the bars dug up?

2. Where did all the soil go?

Let's try to answer these questions.

The first thing that comes to mind is reservoirs for collecting rainwater and subsequent irrigation of fields through canals. It is quite logical. In addition, during the rainy season, this area can be flooded and turn into one continuous body of water. Otherwise, the water could drain into the barn. But the second question is much more difficult to answer: where did the millions of cubic meters of soil go? There are no large hills in the area.

My version: these reservoirs are quarries for the extraction of building material, laterite:

Extraction of laterite in India. Plastered Laterite Elephant Statue

It is a clay-like rock with admixtures of sand.

Laterite masonry in Angkor. Sandstone is also used here. By the way, where did they get it? There are no mountains or rocky outcrops in the Angkor area. Delivered? Hundreds of kilometers away? Or maybe they made artificial sandstone?

Laterite, most likely, turns to stone in the air, it reacts with CO2 and it turns into a solid stone such as we see in the structures of Cambodian temples.

Extraction of laterite in China. Most likely, this is exactly how the laterite mining took place and the gradual excavation of these open-pit mines - barai. The blocks were used for construction. And not only temples. But then the next question is: where are all these buildings? Maybe they are now underground? And the bars were not silted up and had a great depth? Quite possible. And the temples survived due to the fact that they were surrounded by a water barrier, slowing down the flow of water and silt.

There is another version of what happened to the soil from these quarries. The ground was raised with soil. But some of them were poured into three hills, 15-17 km away from the bars. Link to calculations here

But the question remains: why was the soil moved so far? And are these hills really from the digging of these bodies of water?

Most likely we have the same situation here as in other parts of the Earth. A developed culture and civilization existed here. But there was a cataclysm. The surviving groups of people who came later to these places could no longer say who built it all.