Angkor Wat: The Ancient Mystery Of Cambodia’s Lost Capital | The City Of God Kings | Timeline

In 1860, a French naturalist was cutting his way through the Cambodian jungle in search of exotic insects. Henri Mouho suddenly came across the last thing he was expecting, a massive complex of stone temples. Mouho had stumbled across one of the world's most astonishing and enduring architectural feats, the 900-year-old remains of Angkor Wat. But who built these vast, sophisticated temples? Why construct them deep in the jungle, only to abandon them? At first, there were no answers. Then, an amazing eyewitness account from the 13th century emerged in China. The author describes the great temple of Angkor, a fantastic citadel and its resourceful inhabitants. How could this be true? The evidence was scant. Now, science is providing unexpected proof. Archaeologists are applying the latest techniques to reveal the mysteries of Angkor. And radar images from space reveal that Angkor was much bigger than originally imagined, a vast city the size of London. Scientists now know that Angkor Wat was just a small part of one of the largest and most sophisticated cities in the world. Angkor Wat, one of the world's true enigmas, its size and purpose baffling. Larger than any cathedral, it is truly one of the greatest structures ever built. Its towers, shaped like lotus flowers, were raised 100 years before the Cathedral of Chartres in France. The buildings are laid out on a vast scale, stone shrines ascending one upon the other as if reaching for the heavens. Endless corridors are carved with the longest reliefs in the world. The precise construction would be hard to match even with lasers used by modern surveyors. Archaeologist Charles Haim has studied all aspects of Angkor and its inhabitants, the Khmer. Professor Haim has been crucial to understanding the extraordinary history of this ancient culture. We are standing in the middle of the world's largest religious monument. It's absolutely gigantic. It stretches on and on. Angkor Wat was the temple mausoleum of one of Angkor's greatest kings, King Suryavarman II, the Sun King. And when he died, his ashes would have been placed under the heart of the central lotus tower behind me. Angkor Wat, meaning holy temple, is symbolic in every way. Its vast square moat represents the oceans around Mount Meru, legendary home of the Hindu gods. When Ori Muo stumbled across Angkor in 1860, he wrote, one of these temples, a rival to that of Solomon and erected by some ancient Michelangelo, might take an honorable place beside our most beautiful buildings. It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome. The Frenchman suspected that the temples belonged to a huge and sophisticated civilization, but he had no evidence. Angkor Wat lies in the northwest floodplains of Cambodia, just above the Great Lake. When Muo discovered it in 1860, only a handful of Buddhist monks and local villagers lived around the ancient site. None of them knew how Angkor Wat had evolved or who had built it. Legend had it that the great temple had built itself. Some said that it had always been there. In Europe, the publication of Muo's journal created a sensation. Soon, a stream of explorers, photographers, and archeologists traveled east, keen to uncover the mysteries of this vanished world. But Ori Muo's part in this puzzle came to a sudden end. Bitten by a poisonous insect, he died in the jungle a year after discovering the incredible site. As early explorers began to strip away the jungle, they discovered even more temples. The walls of the vast monuments were covered in intricate carvings. These reliefs illustrate legends of an ancient culture and its religion. The sandstone sections were carved in place. They would have taken the artists decades to complete. Inscriptions here are written not only in an ancient Cambodian language, but also, mysteriously, in Sanskrit, the priestly language of the Hindus. One of the great breakthroughs has been the translation of the entire corpus of Angkorian inscriptions by a French scholar, Georges Sadez, in seven thick volumes. And so, bit by bit, the actual internal history of Angkor has been unraveled, and that's been absolutely critical. To the codebreakers, they disclosed that for six centuries, Angkor had been the capital of the Khmer, the indigenous people of Cambodia. Between the 9th and 15th centuries AD, a total of 38 kings ruled their empire from Angkor. Its borders reached from southern Vietnam to Laos, and from the Mekong River to eastern Burma. But whose grand vision was this great city? And why was it built in the middle of the jungle? The deciphering continued. Then, an astonishing discovery was made. A junior Chinese official on a diplomatic mission visited Angkor in the summer of 1296 AD. During his year-long visit, Zhou Daguan kept a journal. His diary tells of a major civilization, a capital much bigger and more developed than the archaeologists dared imagine. But was Zhou Daguan's account fact or myth? Archaeologists searched for proof of the existence of the city Zhou described. As they pieced together this gigantic puzzle, the full story began to emerge. For thousands of years, the indigenous people of Cambodia, the Khmer, had cut rice fields from the jungle. These farmers were a largely self-contained and peaceful race. But from the 1st century AD, small feuding kingdoms developed around the country. In the 8th century, a great leader emerged. To find a site for a grand new sacred capital, he abandoned his home city in the eastern part of Cambodia and ordered all his subjects to cross the Mekong River in a great march west. Having conquered his rivals, he chose the lush land between the sacred Kulen Hills and the Great Lake for his new citadel. In 802 AD, he had himself crowned Jayavarman, the supreme world emperor, king of kings. Jayavarman's charisma won the people over. He came not only to rule by divine consent, but to be worshipped as a god himself. At a stroke, this great and charismatic leader changed the course of Cambodian history. Over the next 500 years, Jayavarman's descendants, living gods, succeeded him to reign in Angkor. Each king had his own monument built to his glory, destined to become his mausoleum. Since the second century AD, the Khmers had practiced Hinduism. Each of the royal temples is modeled on the five peaks of Mount Meru, the home of the Indian gods. For their builders, the shrines were a celebration of religion, art, science, and power. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Cambodia was part of France's colonial empire. It was they who led the way in piecing Angkor together. When they arrived and took colonial control of this part of the world, the place was an absolute shambles. I mean, there were stones just lying around everywhere. It was nothing like what you see today. And so they've dedicated vast amount of energy and effort into the reconstruction of the temples. In the 1960s, the eminent archaeologist, Bernard-Philippe Crollier, made this comparison of Angkor. Imagine that within the city limits of Paris, you found thrown together Versailles, the Place de la Concorde, and the Louvre. Surrounding these, the cathedrals of Notre-Dame, Chartres, and Rheims, flanked by all the churches built in Paris before the 19th century. Since Henri More had first discovered Angkor in 1860, much had been learned about its history. But almost nothing was known about the culture responsible for these incredible monuments. The largest religious monument in the world, the City of the Gods, Angkor Wat in the heart of Cambodia. But is this astonishing temple only the visible tip of a greater unseen mystery? 700 years ago, a junior Chinese official visited Angkor on a diplomatic mission. During his 11-month stay with a Cambodian family, he recorded many aspects of life in Angkor. But Zhou Daguan's account contains several flights of fancy. For instance, he describes the great temple of Angkor Wat as having been built in a single day by a legendary Chinese architect. He was also openly judgmental, referring to his hosts as barbarians. Archaeologists have taken his writings with a pinch of salt. You've always got to think of it as being seen through the eyes of an educated Chinese, for whom anyone beyond the empire was, by definition, a barbarian. And in reading what he has to say, one has to be certainly on occasion judicious in realising that the prejudices were there. For 100 years, French archaeologists were too busy restoring the temples to pay the journal much attention, so it was largely ignored. Then, in the 1970s, the murderous regime of Pol Pot stopped all work at Angkor. His army of communist revolutionaries, the Khmer Rouge, laid thousands of landmines around the site, rendering it off-limits for years. Now, at last, stability has returned to Cambodia, and work on the temples has resumed. Today, Angkor has world heritage, and heritage site protection, with a dozen countries funding archaeological research. With much of the major restoration work complete, the focus has shifted away from the temples at the centre and onto the outlying pieces of the puzzle. Just north of Angkor Wat, an eight-mile wall encloses the remains of several magnificent stone temples. Explorer Henri Mouho suspected in 1860 that this was once the Khmer's great capital of Angkor Thom, the Holy City. The perfectly square wall, like Angkor Wat, is surrounded by a moat, and covers an area the size of Manhattan Island. At its centre is the Bayon Temple. In his journal from 1296, Jo Dagwan describes a busy city teeming with life. Archaeologists are now looking for evidence that this is the great metropolis he was describing. But any evidence has all but vanished under dense forest. In the last two years, archaeologist Jacques Gauchere has started to excavate the interior of the walled city. When I started this study, we knew almost nothing because everything was covered in forest. The only surviving features were the stone temples and the foundation of a royal palace, but we knew nothing of the rest of the 900 hectares within the city wall. For a while, it seemed that Gauchere was fighting a losing battle, but his persistence is at last producing results. After two years of very difficult research, we've at last begun to build an impression of this city. Gauchere is plotting thousands of coordinates onto an ever more detailed map of Angkor Thom. He is now able to trace an intricate grid system of canals and roads, together with the sites of thousands of wooden houses. Back in 1860, when Henri Moreau discovered Angkor Wat, he had suspected that it was just part of a complex city. Joe Daguan's 13th century journal alludes to a political and religious citadel. Now at last, archaeologists have enough evidence to bring to life this extraordinary city as it looked 700 years ago. Angkor was a capital far bigger and far in advance of any European city of the time. Jacques Gauchere's findings confirm the accuracy of Joe Daguan's account. What he describes is fact, not fantasy. These are the monuments which have caused merchants from overseas to speak so often of Cambodia, the rich and noble. If you are looking for gold lions, gold Buddhas, bronze elephants and bronze horses, this is where you'll find them. From the inscriptions, archaeologists know that Angkor Thom, the holy city, was built nearly a century before Joe arrived by the Khmer's greatest monarch. Jayavarman VII ruled over Cambodia between 1181 and 1219. Known as the Great Builder King, he expanded the empire further than any other Khmer ruler. Within the city walls, the king built a palace befitting his mighty empire. The royal palace stands to the north of the Golden Tower. Lintels and columns, all decorated with carved and painted Buddhas, are immense. The roofs, too, are impressive. Long colonnades and open corridors stretch away, interlaced in harmonious relation. Jacques Gauchere's excavations at the royal palace confirm Joe's account. We found evidence that this palace was a large area with interconnecting quarters and buildings. We found holes 80 centimetres in diameter for huge supporting columns. It would have been a very impressive sight. As evidence materialises about the royal palace, the role of the Khmer's rulers is to ensure the safety of the Khmer people. These earthly gods becomes clearer. During his stay, Joe Daguan had several audiences with the ruling king. Every time I was admitted to the palace for an audience with a king, he came forward with his chief wife and took his place in the embrasure of the golden window in the main audience hall. Joe himself came from a culture with a ruler elevated to godhood. The Chinese approved of the Khmer's devotion. These people know what is due a king. The king topped a social pyramid that stretched down to the lowest peasant. The monarch's potency showed itself in a legend Joe Daguan relates. Out of the palace rises a golden tower to the top of which the ruler ascends nightly to sleep. It is common belief that in the tower dwells a genie formed like a serpent with nine heads, which is lord of the entire kingdom. Every night, the genie appears in the shape of a woman with whom the sovereign couples. Should the genie fail to appear for a single night, it is a sign that the king's death is at hand. If the king should fail to keep his tryst, disaster is sure to follow. Well, I'm not sure about that. He would have been a fine king had he been able to do that for any length of time. But what we do know is that it was a practice of the aristocrats to send, and the regional landed gentry, as it were, to send up a woman from their family to be a member of the king's entourage, to become a concubine, which would in a sense bind the provinces to the center in a very physical manner. And it wouldn't be surprising if indeed the king did have a very substantial harem from which to choose. Joe Daguin notes that the king had five wives and a harem of 3,000 women. The king was rarely seen outside the palace, but Joe describes one such occasion, the New Year festival. As night comes on, the king is besought to take part in the spectacle. The rockets are fired and the crackers touched off. The rockets can be seen from 13 kilometers away. The firecrackers, larger swivel guns, shake the whole city. Below the king was an army of bureaucrats graded by rank, as Joe describes. In this country, there is a hierarchy of ministers, generals, astronomers, and other functionaries. Beneath these come all sorts of small employees, differing only in name from our own. These would all have been descendants of families honored by the original Jayavarman, who had founded Angkor 500 years earlier. What is not clear from Joe's writings is how many people lived in Angkor. Sanskrit inscriptions in temples such as Ta Prohm offer valuable clues. We know that the temple housed at least 12,000 people, including a number of great priests, I think over 650 dancers and various other officiants to maintain the temple and to do the necessary temple duties. If 12,000 people served a single temple, what was the overall population? Jacques Gauchere's new research is not yet complete, but it does support an educated guess. To give a number, this city could have been between 80,000, 90,000, and 150,000 people. In the same period, the population of London totaled no more than 30,000. So discoveries are confirming that what Henri Mouho suspected and Joe Daguan alleges is correct. Angkor Thom was indeed a large, well-structured city with a huge population. Now suspicions are aroused that the jungle conceals an altogether bigger surprise, a metropolis so vast that its full extent can only be detected from space. The search for the hidden empire of Angkor was about to take an unexpected turn. In 1994, archaeologists persuaded NASA to undertake a unique task. The space agency had developed specialist radar to penetrate vegetation. Their challenge was to probe the area of Angkor in Cambodia as the space shuttle Endeavour passed over Southeast Asia. The resulting images cover an area 100 kilometers long and 10 kilometers wide. For the first time, scientists have an accurate impression of the wider city's infrastructure 1,000 years ago. Covering an area the size of London, this rural metropolis was immense. For archaeologist Elizabeth Moore, this is a major breakthrough. It is revolutionizing understanding of the size of the kingdom. At first people said, well, you won't find anything new at Angkor, but we have. What the radar has shown us is just how all the regions contributed to what then became the central zone of Angkor. The radar pictures also reveal previously unknown temples all over the Angkor region. The city is surrounded by a vast Mediterranean basin, as well as an intricate network of roads and canals, all leading to the walled city. Evident for the first time is the grid plan of this once great metropolis. When you start looking at the radar imagery and you see the sophistication with which they were able to control and alter their terrain, I've never seen a culture like it elsewhere in Southeast Asia in terms of manipulating the landscape, of using it to their benefit. Now the challenge for archaeologists was to work out at ground level what had been photographed from space. Archaeologist Christophe Potier is using the images as a route map to trace the layout of ancient Angkor. The newly discovered temples were at the center of their own communities. Just like village churches in Europe, they indicate the size of each settlement, showing the true extent of the metropolis. Today, Potier and his Cambodian assistant, Sin Chenda, attempt to locate a number of previously unrecorded ruins outside the walled city of Angkor Thom. Wow, it's a quite nice one. It seems to be a Garuda. You can see very clearly the Garuda with his wings. He's like an eagle. Quite interesting. Unfortunately, it has been badly damaged, but it's nice. And compared to the style, it could be a late ninth century, maybe first part of the 10th. Temples like this would have been the centers of villages housing between one and 300 people. Potier and his colleagues have established that the number of temple sites like this in the region runs into thousands, suggesting a massive population. There was a direct relationship between these villages and the royal capital. An ancient inscription persuades archaeologists like Charles Hyam of the link. We know that at least 80,000 or so people from 3,000 villages were assigned to supply all the goods that we needed annually to maintain it in a good condition. Vast amounts of produce and thousands of people would have been transported from the villages. A complex network of roads leading to the center is evident from the NASA pictures. The inscriptions point to the great builder king, Jayavarman. Jayavarman VII was a fantastic builder. Across his whole kingdom, he had roads constructed. He was a great man for infrastructure. One reason being that he wanted pilgrims to go and visit his places and so he had rest houses built at one day's journey apart. He moved and shaped more stone than every other Angkorian king combined and he must go down in world history as one of the great builders of all time. If all the outlying temples were connected in one giant conurbation, then Angkor can be acknowledged as a rural metropolis, as big as modern day London. At its heart, a walled royal enclave the size of Westminster. There are hundreds, let's say thousands of that kind of small sanctuaries spread all around the area of Angkor, but the larger area of Angkor. And it's that show, obviously, when there was village everywhere, almost everywhere. Early research suggests that this metropolis could have had a population of a million people. This would make Angkor, at its peak, between the 11th and 13th centuries, one of the largest cities in the world. The indigenous Cambodians, the Khmer, were powerful and successful. They managed to build one of the most extraordinary cities in history in one of the world's most hostile climates. But how was such a large population able to survive and prosper in the heart of an inhospitable jungle? The answer lies in the Khmer's ability to harness their most precious asset. Cambodia has eight months without rain when rivers become a muddy trickle. Then for a few months, the monsoon brings floods. For this reason, Angkor is built close to the Great Lake, which swells to four times its size in the rainy season. It not only provided precious water throughout the year, but also an inexhaustible supply of fish. Jo Dagwan records. Of all the fish, the black carp is the most abundant. Next in number, the tench and freshwater congers. The prawns of Chanan weigh as much as half a kilo apiece. Crocodiles there are as large as boats. Apart from fish, the staple diet, like most of Asia, was rice. Paddy fields need a plentiful supply of water to ensure a healthy crop. When the founding ruler Jayavarman arrived at Angkor, there were already peasant farmers cultivating ancient rice fields. But from the 9th to the 13th centuries, successive god-kings ordered thousands more acres of jungle to be cleared for rice production. Water had to be cleverly harnessed to irrigate the new fields. If the system failed, the very survival of the kingdom would be at stake. Well-maintained canals were also crucial to Angkor. Every day, tons of heavy stones for the construction of temples would be transported by canal from the Kulen Hills, 50 kilometers away. Planning expert Jacques Gauchard believes the success of Angkor is due to the elaborate system of interconnecting waterways. You have tanks or ponds which are dug to keep also this water, and you have some canalization. This royal palace is full of small canalization. The city is full of channels, and the outside, the territories, are also full of big channels. These systems, which are at different level of scale, they must have been connected to each other. It was the Khmer's ability to harness water that made them unique. While the Dutch were experimenting with their first canals, the Khmer were already past masters. The most recent excavation by Jacques Gauchard reveals the complexity of Khmer water management within the royal city. His surveys have uncovered two huge reservoirs, each measuring 300 meters long and 20 meters wide. A major road intersected them. Water needed to flow around the city. What Gauchard wanted to know was how the road could be used while water still flowed from one reservoir to the other. So he began to dig. The excavation unearthed a stone dike where the road and reservoirs met. It also shows that the reservoirs were built on slightly different levels. Beneath the surface of the road, narrow channels in the dike allow water to filter from the upper reservoir into the lower. But the arrangement may have been too finely balanced. Playing at such a scale with the management of water with such small differences of level, I think the system was quite fragile. And if there were any variability in the environment or in the maintenance of the city for social problems or political ones, I think the precision, I mean the ultra sophistication can have been a weakness in the system in a way. This complex system provided water throughout the royal city for drinking, cooking and even bathing. Cambodia is an excessively hot country and it is impossible to get through the day without bathing several times. There are no bath houses, no basins. However, every family has a pond or several families of one in common. Men and women go naked into this pond. The construction of extensive water systems and great stone temples in the jungle demanded colossal manpower. Why would the Khmer be prepared to devote so much of their year toiling in the king's name? Why was it that the peasantry out there in the fields contributed so much labor, willingly it seems, to the maintenance of the center? And the answer may well be that they really believed that the king was a god and they were working in the service of the deity and this kept them going. Oh, I think without a doubt, I fully agree with you. You couldn't have built the city of Angkor without that kind of firm belief. But although the Khmer people dedicated enormous effort into constructing their great city, it was the addition of slave labor that made it possible. Zhou describes these unfortunates. Wild men from the hills can be bought to serve as slaves. Families of wealth may own more than 100. Those of lesser means content themselves with 10 or 20. Only the very poor have none. We know too, again from the inscriptions, that some of them had a very raw deal. There was one who tried to escape from the land in which he was born and was assigned and they found him and they brought him back and they gouged his eyes out and cut off his ears. Punishment was severe for all subjects of Angkor, noted the Chinese diplomat. In very serious cases, a ditch is dug outside the city. The criminal is dropped into it. Earth and stones are heaped on top until he is buried alive. Lesser crimes are dealt with by cutting off feet or hands or by amputating the nose. The economy of Angkor was based on international trade. The Khmers produced food for their swelling population, but there was a surplus for trade with neighboring states. They wove fine cloth, cast huge bronze statues and exported ivory, kingfisher feathers, beeswax and scented wood. Their main trading partner was China. The reliefs at the Bayon reveal a Chinese trade junk coming across the waters of the Great Lake just south of Angkor. And we know that there was indeed a great deal of trade going on because of the more recent archaeological research that has been excavating in the Royal Palace and there they've been unearthing a considerable quantity of Chinese ceramics. Zhou Daguan's delegation were not the only Chinese in Angkor. In fact, Chinese settlers had been there for years. The Chinese always take a wife here as soon as they arrive, deriving additional benefit from the woman's business skills. In Cambodia, it is the women who take charge of trade. There are no shops in which the merchants live. Instead, they display their goods on mattings spread on the ground. Women held positions of power and authority. They owned property, engaged in trade and even served as bodyguards to the king. But the Chinese interest in Cambodian women was not driven solely by trade. Everyone with whom I talked said that the Cambodian women are highly sexed. One or two days after giving birth to a child, they are ready for intercourse. If a husband is not responsive, he will be discarded. By the end of the 13th century, Angkor was at its peak. A succession of god kings had built this beautiful and astonishing city. A sophisticated water system made the city work, fed its people and created wealth. But then, at its very peak, cracks in the system began to appear, cracks that would lead to the city being abandoned to the jungle. It took nearly 500 years for Angkor to grow to the vast city that the Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan described in 1296. Yet just a century later, the city lay deserted, given up to the jungle. But why? Throughout history, there are few examples of cities being totally abandoned. One key factor is known. Throughout Angkor's history, the Khmer had waged war with their neighbors. In the early years of Angkor, the Vietnamese Chams were the Khmer's sworn enemies. Most of the temple walls around the capital depict epic battles against the Chams. But by the time of Zhou Daguan's visit, the main threat came from the emerging Thai kingdom of Siam as it expanded into Cambodia. He recounts, "'Recently, during the war with Siam, "'whole villages have been laid waste.' "'In the diplomat's eyes, "'the Khmer army was ill-prepared for war. "'Soldiers move about unclothed and barefoot. "'In the right hand is carried a lance, "'in the left a shield. "'They have no bows, no missiles, "'no breastplates and no helmets. "'Generally speaking, "'these people have neither discipline nor strategy.'" Inscriptions show that in 1431, the Thais sacked Angkor. They looted everything possible, enslaving much of the population, including the king's entire harem, and carried them off to Thailand. Abandoned, the city of Angkor was slowly reabsorbed into the jungle from which it had emerged five centuries before. Henri Moua wrote in 1860, "'One must ask, what has become of this powerful race, "'so civilized and enlightened to create "'these gigantic works?' The conventional explanation is that the empire's rulers lost their grip on power and the Thais simply scared them off. But the mystery of Angkor takes another twist. Today, archaeologists believe that there were other factors at work. Charles Hyam points to the great builder king, Jayavarman VII. Perhaps because of the excesses of Jayavarman VII, who clearly was a builder with a frenzy of activity, and he may well have said, and it might be true, that he exhausted the resources of the state and it went into a decline. Jayavarman VII was the first Buddhist king after several hundred years of Hindu worship. This more compassionate religion may have given the Khmer cause to reflect on the excesses of their kings. And I wonder whether, in fact, the slow decline that may well have set in was the result of a lack of belief out in the fields there that the king was, in fact, a deity and that this vital link between the two began to fray. Jacques Gaucher theorizes that while the Khmer's success can be attributed to the harnessing of water, it could also have led to their undoing. Such was the fine balance of nature that if irrigation and the storage of water were not kept up, they could easily fall into disrepair. The water system was very fragile because it was so sophisticated. And the problem is, if it's not well maintained, it could easily become blocked by sediment. The kings who came after Jayavarman VII were less interested in grand building plans. It's also possible they stopped maintaining the intricate water system. Deforestation was also a likely contributor. So much jungle had been cut back for rice growing that undoubtedly the rivers and canals would have silted up, which in turn would have led to an ecological disaster for the Khmer. Christophe Pottier believes the clues are obvious. The pound is very clear there with the water. At the end of Angkor, pieces of the forest should have been very, very rare. Very. So deforestation is not a new problem, it's an old one. It is most likely that it was a combination of these factors that led the Khmer to abandon their once great city. What remained of the Khmer court reestablished itself on the banks of the Mekong, near Cambodia's present-day capital of Phnom Penh. We're not talking about the actual collapse and total demise of a civilization. What happened was that they moved sensibly to the east, down to the Mekong River and away from the Thais. Now completely Buddhist, renouncing material wealth, the Khmer would never again embrace the lofty heights they had in Angkor. For 400 years, Angkor lay derelict and forgotten until its rediscovery by Orimuo in 1860. Today, Angkor is recognized as a wonder of the world. In Cambodia's new era of stability, archaeologists from around the world continue to make fresh discoveries. At last, a world lost to the jungle is reemerging, a major metropolis that for over half a millennium dominated a thriving empire, one of the greatest cities the world has ever known.