Name: Angkor Wat: City Of The God Kings (Ancient Civilisations Documentary) | Timeline
Uploaded: 2018-09-06T05:18:39.000Z
Duration: 49 min 34 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In 1860, a french naturalist was cutting his way through the cambodian jungle in search of exotic insects.

Adverbs of manner

Henry Mouhot suddenly came across the last thing he was expecting: a massive complex of stone temples.

Past perfect

Muhot had stumbled across one of the world's most astonishing and enduring architectural feats:

But who built these vast sophisticated temples?

Why construct them deep in the jungle only to abandon them?

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.

Now science is providing unexpected proof.

Archeologists are applying the latest techniques to reveal the mysteries of Angkor

and radar images from space revealed that Angkor was much bigger than originally imagined.

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 a hundred years before the cathedral of Chartres in France.

The buildings were 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 Higham has studied all aspects of Angkor and its inhabitants the khmer.

Professor Higham 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 surya Varman the second, the sun King and

When he died his ashes would have been placed under the heart of the central register 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 Henri Mouhat stumbled across encore in 1860 he wrote

Arrival to that of solomon and directed by some ancient, Michelangelo might take an honourable place beside our most beautiful buildings

It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome

The Frenchman suspected that the temples belong 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 Mouhot 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.

In Europe, the publication of Mouhot journal created a sensation

Soon a stream of explorers photographers and archaeologists traveled east

keen to uncover the mysteries of this vanished world

But our Amuro's part in this puzzle came to a sudden end

Bitten by a poisonous insect he died in the jungle the 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

George sur Des 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 disclose that the sixth centuries ankle 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 Berlin

But whose grand Vision was this great city, and why was it built in the middle of the jungle?

Junior Chinese official on a diplomatic mission visited angkor in the summer of 1296 Ad

During his year-long visit show doug juan kept a journal

his diary tells of a major Civilization a

Capital much bigger and more developed than the archaeologists dared imaginable

But was show Doug ones account fact or myth

archeologists searched for proof of the existence of the City Joe described

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 first century ad small feuding kingdoms developed around the country

In the eighth century a great leader emerged

to find a site for a brand new sacred capital the 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 : hills and great lake for his new citadel

In 802 ad he had himself crowned Jaya Baumann the Supreme World Emperor King of Kings

Jiya Varma's Charisma one 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 Jaya varmints descendants living God's 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 Kumar's 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 the place was an absolute shambles

I mean there were stones. Just like I found everywhere

There's nothing like what you see today, and so they dedicated vast amount of energy and effort into the reconstruction of the temples in

The 1960s the eminent archaeologist been Bernard Phil Croley 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 Rennes

flanked by all the churches built in Paris before the 19th century

Since Henri Mouhot 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