The urban center of Angkor in what is now Cambodia has long been known as one of the Earth ’s great former city . However , just how large it was at its peak has remain debated , with most of the city reclaimed by the jungle and its extent unclear . A new study indicates that at its summit in the thirteenth century , Angkor house 10 times as many citizenry as London at the same fourth dimension , far exceeding any contemporary European city .
The Khmer Empire ( 802 CE to 1431 CE ) , ruled from Angkor , wrap up modern - day Cambodia , Laos , and much of Thailand and Vietnam . European visitor to southeast Asia were astound by the scale ofAngkor Wat , the Brobdingnagian temple at the city ’s heart , thought to be the largest spiritual structure by solid ground area in the world . They used various methods to set about to estimate how many multitude once lived around it . Their technique were unreliable , however , and total up with wildly diverging build . The unconscious process has continued since , interrupted by the challenges of visiting the area during the Khmer Rouge ( 1951 – 1999 ) horrors and the civic warfare that followed .
Dr Sarah Klassenof the University of British Columbia has taken up the task , using modernistic technology such as eggbeater - mountedlidarto expand our knowledge of the metropolis ’s changing extent , along with traditional archaeological excavation data , to present the first exemplar of demographic growth in Angkor .
“ Estimating Angkor ’s population has been an enduring challenge , as formal methods for approximate population size of it and compactness in urban area are not easy applied at Angkor , where nonreligious computer architecture was compose almost entirely of organic materials that decayed century ago , leaving no structural remains , ” Klassen and co - authors write inScience Advances .
However , by seeking more subtle traces of human abode Klassen and cobalt - author believe they have established the city ’s boundaries at unlike time . immix these with denseness estimates they conclude the big Angkor area , include what we might now call suburbia , held 700,000 - 900,000 people between 1180 and 1300 , the city ’s peak .
For comparison , London was home to just80,000 peopleat the final stage of this clip , and for most of Angkor ’s flower was considerably small . Other dandy European metropolis were enceinte , butestimatesplace even the cracking at between one-fourth to half of Angkor ’s size . It is probable to have been the most populous metropolis in the world at the time by a foresighted way .
Around 160,000 the great unwashed lived in the thickly packed civic - ceremonial center , with the rest in the much larger Angkor metropolitan area and embankments . The city sprawled over some 3,000 square kilometers ( 1,200 straight miles ) , allowing much of its food for thought to be grown in the outer reaches . The authors acknowledge the size of the city ’s economical catchment area is not known .
The drive of Angkor ’s decay are even more heavily debated than its peak size , but disease and change to the monsoon season probably bestow , along with failures to keep up the irrigation organisation on which the city depended . This tolerate the Khmers to shine under the power of the adjacent Siamese empire , who send away Angkor in retribution for a uprising in 1431 , chair to most of its citizen abandoning the city .
