Angkor Wat and the hydraulic city

Suryavarman II built Angkor Wat as a temple-mountain mirroring the cosmos; around it the Khmer engineered the largest pre-industrial urban water system known.

Why it matters

Angkor was the world's most extensive pre-modern city by area — its canals, reservoirs and rice surpluses are what a temple economy could finance. A Hindu-Buddhist cosmology realized as civil engineering.

People

Suryavarman II

Related events

• c. 100 BCE – 200 CE

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Sources

• Encyclopædia Britannica — Angkor Wat