Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [334]
The distribution of population in urbanized societies familiar to us is inhomogeneous and hierarchical. That is, within a given area most of the landscape is used for farmland or industry and occupied at low population density, while a much smaller fraction of the landscape is urban and occupied at high density. The urban areas form a hierarchy, with at the top a large metropolis, below which in size and population come some medium-sized cities, then small cities, towns, and villages, surrounded by farmland which is clearly distinct from cities.
However, in the Khmer Empire, at least in its well-studied central core, all of those middle levels of hierarchy were missing: the only major city was Angkor, below which there were only small provincial centers. In that vast urban core the distinction between urban areas and farmland was blurred or absent. Angkor was instead a low-density city in which rice fields lay immediately outside the walls of temples, and the city itself consisted largely of rice fields with farmers’ houses spread out in clusters and lines across the landscape. Angkor’s area, of about 400 square miles, was thus far greater than that of the familiar high-density pre-industrial cities of Eurasia, such as 19th-century Tokyo (known as Edo), medieval Constantinople, 7th-century Baghdad, Rome during the Roman Empire, and other European cities before the 16th century, all of which were less than 40 square miles in area and mostly less than 10 square miles. While Angkor’s population density was lower than that of these high-density cities, its vastly greater area resulted in Angkor’s total population, estimated at about 750,000, approached that of a great contemporary Chinese capital.
It is becoming apparent to archaeologists that such low-density agriculturally based pre-industrial cities used to be a more widespread phenomenon in the moist tropics than we had realized. The growing list of examples includes the great Classic Lowland Maya cities until the 9th century A.D., such as Tikal and Copán; the Sri Lanka cities of Anuradhapura and Pollonaruwa, from around the 4th century B.C. until the 12th century A.D.; Bagan in 13th-century Myanmar; two cities of Angkor’s enemies, the Cham capital of My Son in Vietnam until the 13th century and the Thai capital of Sukhotai from A.D. 1238 to 1438; and perhaps also the 9th- and 10th-century Javan center around the temples of Borobudur and Prambanan. We have no European eyewitness account of any of those low-density tropical cities at their peaks, because all had declined or been abandoned by the time that Europeans began to explore the world, around A.D. 1500. Evidently, in the long run there was something apparently unstable about this city model: what was it? I shall return to this question for the case of Angkor.
Despite the lack of contemporary European descriptions of Angkor, we do have a lengthy account by a Chinese visitor, the commercial attaché Zhou Daguan, who spent a year in Angkor, from A.D. 1295 to 1296, at the end of King Jayavarman the Eighth’s reign. By astonishing good fortune, a copy of part of Zhou’s account was rediscovered in Beijing in the 19th century. His detailed descriptions of daily life at Angkor complement the inscriptions that tell us about the temple administrations and the depictions of ceremonies and wars on Angkor’s temple bas-reliefs that provide