Parallel Civilizations: Ancient Angkor and the Ancient Maya

this program is a presentation of uctv for educational and non-commercial use only check out our youtube original channel uctv prime at u c youtube.com v prime subscribe today to get new programs every week pleasure to welcome you today to the third of three hitchcock lectures to be given by professor michael coe the hitchcock endowment fund was established in 1865 to recognize the highest levels of scholarly thought and achievement this fund has grown over the years and has brought many notable individuals to the berkeley campus including niels bohr robin oppenheimer and stephen hawking the request has become one of the most cherished endowments of the university of california we are pleased to present to you today under the aegis of the hitchcock professorship fund the highly distinguished professor michael coe professor cole is the charles j mccurdy professor of anthropology emeritus at yale university as one of the foremost authorities in historical archaeology his studies of ancient mayan culture and writing systems have been heralded as major developments and the understanding and evolution of this fascinating civilization thanks to professor koh's work we now know much more about the maya a people that achieve remarkable advancements in art literature mathematics and astronomy professor koh has written numerous books on the maya including breaking the maya code and the art of the maya scribe he has also written about a broad array of mesoamerican subjects ranging from pre-columbian art pottery and ceramics to the history of chocolate in the western hemisphere which i trust some of you heard about yesterday professor kohl's work is sensitive to developments in all areas of maya research and to the growing knowledge about interactions between amaya and other ancient peoples of the region his studies have also extended to other mesoamerican civilizations including both the aztecs of central mexico and the olmec in southern mexico and central america as a result of these efforts his work has significantly contributed to the awareness of mesoamerican history and has influenced our understanding of the evolution of ancient civilizations in general in this lecture today entitled parallel civilizations ancient anchor and the ancient maya professor code discusses the evolution of yet another mysterious civilization from the other side of the world the ancor of ancient cambodia the anco are still an enigma and a matter of dispute among academics was a remarkable civilization that housed a vast urban complex professor co believes that there are potential analogies to be drawn between the ancient anchor and mayan settlement patterns and so holding he hopes to illuminate the mysteries that enshroud this ancient and fascinating civilization without further delay i am pleased to present to you professor michael cohen i'd really like to express warm thanks to dean mason and the members of the hitchcock committee for inviting me here i've enjoyed this tremendously nothing like an audience to a retired old professor i haven't had an audience for a long time and you've been a good one i got interested in this subject of ancient cambodia a very long time ago almost as long ago as i've been involved with the peoples of mesoamerica in 1954 on my way back from a two-year assignment in the far east i decided i wanted to go to encore and one could then and this was no less than 46 years ago and i was flabbergasted i had been in the maya area quite a lot ever since i was a sophomore at at harvard and changed my major from english to anthropology so i could study the maya and i'd seen the great myocytes not all of them by a long shot but i had seen them in their tropical forest setting and when i walked through encore i was just flabbergasted at how similar encore was to a classic maya site the jungle looked the same the animal sounded the same the uh a lot of the sculpture looked similar and certainly the architecture really resounded now this afternoon i'm not going to draw any conclusions or even suggest that there were any connections between these two frankly not for publication i think there were but that's another story that's in my dotage that's what i'm going to devote myself to but nobody else would believe me on this but there are some amazing parallels between these two cultures now the great strength of being an anthropologist rather than any other kind of an ologist is that anthropology from its very uh founding from its founders back in the mid 19th century has been a comparative study um it began as a really the comparative study of civilizations and in particular of ancient religions and some of the great theorists uh back in those days um men like louis henry morgan and edward tyler and people of this sort who who were the founding fathers of anthropology were comparative uh scholars they believed that by comparing civilizations in the past through time and space you could you could illuminate the whole story of how human cultures came about to be now this afternoon i'm not going to draw any great conclusions by a long shot there's some big questions that can be raised perhaps without any good answers and some little ones i'm not a person who believes that all cultures can be reduced to one particular grand unified field theory i don't think that that works and i don't think it has worked in the past and it's led us down many false uh paths that uh ended up in a blank and turned out to be wrong i'm a believer in multiple causations but you'll see some interesting parallels uh when we get to them between these two cultures now i've been back uh since the peace has returned to that really troubled land of cambodia i've been back five times and i'll be there again next month and each time i go i learn something new it's a place one can go to now and i'm glad i i came very close to wanting when i got back to harvard to dropping all this stuff about the maya i came back into graduate school as a graduate student uh to study and i thought well the heck with them i think i'll do the ancient khmer of cambodia this is really going to be the future i'm so glad i did not because of the the really the tragic history of that place uh war-torn massacres genocide every horrible thing that can ever happen to a people in the land has happened to these people and i would have had no success whatsoever so i stuck with the maya and the other mesa americans but now in my old age i'm coming back to an original love of mine and i'm not sorry about it so i think we'll start with the first slide now uh for those of you who didn't hear me about the the maya i just wanted to recapitulate some of the what we know about the maya civilization without spending any great time on it so we can move across the ocean to cambodia and to encore and the commercial classic khmer civilization essentially the maya occupied the lowland maya that i'm talking about during the classic period from around 2 50 a.d till about 900 a.d occupied this region of the uh southeastern mesoamerican lowlands the yucatan peninsula and particularly the southern lowlands here which is where most of the uh great ancient cities like tikal and kopan and kirikirigwa and so forth are located sometime beginning about 800 a.d something went drastically wrong with these people and with the civilization and center after center city after city failed to put up dated stone monuments evidence of widespread destruction and mass migration out from there to other parts of mesa america particularly to northern yucatan and apparently to the guatemalan and chiapas highlands down in in here this area was abandoned really pretty much for for hundreds and hundreds almost 800 years uh reverted to to the jungle something terrible happened there and i'll come back to that at the end of this uh lecture when we talk about what happened to encore so uh this is the environment in which this all took place uh this is the uh in northern guatemala uh actually taken from the top one of the higher pyramids at tikal and it's a tropical monsoon forest here that's the original vegetation of the maya lowlands however we do know from pollen studies that have been made by the palinologists that in fact this uh forest is a regrowth that the maya had most of it cut down as a matter of fact towards the end of the classic period due to their agricultural practices but essentially before humans came into this this is what this area looked like it's a tropical forest civilization that arose there now in that kind of environment to make a living of course these people are are maize corn agriculturalists maize beans squash uh chili peppers and a host of other domesticates but essentially maize farmers form of cultivation called sweden or shifting cultivation uh is the rule it has been in for hundreds and hundreds of years and probably was largely so in the past during the classic period shifting uh cultivation uh where the farmer burns down a section of a forest at the end of the dry season he cuts it down excuse me allows it to dry out at the end of the dry season and then fires it and in the ashes plant plants the the maize so that all the nutriments that were in the trees are now in the soil it's not at all a bad form of cultivation except it's highly destructive to the forest and this is one of the reasons why we believe most of it was cut down now that's not the only form of cultivation that the classic maya uh practiced within the last 20 years or or so we have come to know from aerial surveys and on the ground uh checking of this and even through a certain amount of radar survey using uh side looking airborne radar that there is another form of cultivation which was highly intensive in the swampy low-lying areas which are very extensive in the maya region they cut what are basically ditches and canals sort of the way the land of holland was rescued or the fans of eastern england through drainage leaving rectangular plots which are continuously wet and uh using the mud from the uh ditches to to basically uh fertilize uh these these plots and this is a highly intensive form of agriculture that was practiced in uh not ex really over the whole maya area but in certain important places so they could probably support a lot more people than we gave them credit for let's say 50 years ago when we thought slash and burn cultivation was the only kind there were very very high populations we know i won't go into this here now but there's excellent evidence from uh archaeological survey that the populations in the maya area were tremendous where millions of people living in that area that by let's say a thousand a.d probably had only a few thousand that's of course the uh one of the more famous classic maya sites seen from the air these great conglomerations of temple pyramids and palace structures here which are range type buildings with corvell vaulting in which the kings and queens and royal court uh courts of the maya lived and carried out their life these are royal cities in every respect at the bidding of the ruler there was basically all life went on he was a holy person he was a divine king and we will come to these divine kings when we come to cambodia and southeast asia again many of these great maya cities have been extremely well mapped on the ground surveys with testing of structures and uh really uh we know an awful lot about the settlement pattern of places like decal and elsewhere in large part that grew out of the work of my old professor gordon uh willie uh at harvard and now retired um who was the founder of studies of this sort basically in archaeology and was a world leader in this and he turned his attention to the maya area and uh he stimulated all of this kind of ground survey so that we can actually plot out this is tikal most of tikal that you see these are the central acropolis which was the palace of tikal and these are the the great uh temple pyramids here which were dedicated to the royal cult to the cult of dead kings of ancestral kings but huge causeways reservoirs because drinking water is a great problem in the maya area even today but essentially that's a sort of an amorphous settlement pattern it doesn't look like a city a near eastern city it doesn't look like a chinese city laid out on a grid pattern at all but a very very amorphous kind of a settlement pattern but a city nevertheless because it had the function of a city uh most maya architecture uh most of my buildings are really uh like wedding cakes that is there's layer after layer after layer after layer of buildings built up through the centuries by kings who had rebuilding programs and so forth where they tore down the the vaults vaulted structures superstructures on older buildings and then raised other buildings above them so here for instance at the site of washocton which i talked about last time is the original an original temple complex with three temples around it perhaps dedicated to three gods and then successive rebuildings uh until finally this thing has turned into a palace with interior temples at the end of the lake classic this is the kind of archaeology that's been done in the maya area and it's been of the absolutely highest quality and it's the kind of archaeology that's barely begun in southeast asia uh maya architecture was extraordinarily um beautiful uh this is the site of palenque where some of the most beautiful architecture is you're looking at a late classic building 8th century a.d called the temple of the sun at palenque and it was built we know who the person who who built this was it's part of a complex of actually four different major structures in that area built by a king named khan balam the son of the man who was buried in the great temple of the inscriptions there very very uh beautiful all covered with stucco at one point and it was sort of like a billboard up here this is the roof comb which had stucco figures of it of the gods and of the ancestors this is uh from somebody asked me previously about this book by john lloyd stevens john lloyd stevens went in the 1830s to this region with frederick catherwood an english topographical artist and later on catherwood in 1850 published a wonderful lithograph album of his lithographs of uh various maya sites including copan uh stevens bought copan for 50 bucks so they could do whatever they wanted there and they got a wonderful account of it the maya had a uh put up steely dated monuments uh of their kings and put it the other way around the kings put up monuments for themselves this particular king is a guy named and this particular character have put up a number of very important steely or monuments at copan to celebrate his reign and his association with the gods particularly with the maze god and in front of it are uh altars this is a death head altar we don't know a lot about that but the steely are usually associated with these uh altars and of course all of this has hieroglyphic uh writing on it now these maya kings were divine kings they had the title of khul ahau or the holy king of such and such a city and many of these cities had very very long uh dynastic successions very long lineages tikal had dozens of or well almost two dozen rulers uh one after another in an unbroken succession uh really which lasted almost the 700 years the um other cities were had more recent founding and therefore had to invent past genealogies but these kings sat on thrones in their palaces they had probably numbers of wives and a principal wife and they had heirs apparent and all sorts of rights were celebrated by them to mark victories and to mark important time periods the writing as you know from my first lecture can be read uh even if we can't pronounce all of it we can do most of it uh in what we call chordian maya the ancestor of chorty maya which was the literary language of these people and we can read uh this this is a huge this is a great slab from palenque very very late in the history of palenque by a master calligrapher and it's the dynastic history of the kings of palenque particularly mentioning a very important king named pakal who was the guy buried in the temple of the inscriptions in the great sarcophagus and tomb in there and ending up with the ruler down here who commissioned this this whole uh thing a man named cook balaam or cattle jaguar who was also like all of his predecessors a holy king the maya were uh tremendously warliked except the people of copan who were relatively peaceful are there any war monuments there at all but this is uh a wonderful mural and watercolor copy of it at uh in a small building with three rooms at the site of bonham park in the southern maya lowlands and here you have a uh the king a guy named chad moan as war leader in his jaguar costume and with all of his underlings and officers and his principal wife over here and they is this is called the arraignment of the prisoners the maya most of these maya uh political kingdoms were at war at one time or another with other ones and warfare was a tremendously important thing highly highly warlike people as you will see that the khmer of cambodia were and are the political geography of the maya area during the classic is pretty darn well known now um instead of an old empire as earlier people had thought existed there say with tikal as its great capital there never was an empire there never was a unitary political system at any time in the maya lowlands the this is the political geography of the southern maya lowlands as we know it from their inscriptions in particular from the emblem glyphs that i talked about the first time and uh you will see that the actual territory these of course are i idealistic polygons uh that uh the anthropologists have drawn but uh the the the territory is never that they controlled was never very big that they actually controlled that where say this is the territory of the t car polity in fact the boundary between it and the next uh kingdom was never more than a day or two's uh walker march from the capital city so these are not very big it's sort of a balkan type situation and this came as a great surprise to minors to account for this and it marks them off from the civilization that we're going to be looking at shortly so that's what it all looked like uh at the time of the um just before the the whole thing collapsed in the 9th century a.d however having said that it's also true that uh they might have looked all equal there but some of them were more equal than others and uh in particular these two uh cities kalakmul here that's its main sign of its emblem glyph the snake city uh uh and tikal this is name anciently named khan or snake and this is anciently actually not called but mutual we now know is the real name of dekalb that these two cities hated each other they had a rivalry that went on for centuries in which each one of them would try through diplomatic means and intermarriages and diplomatic visits and whatnot to somehow or another co-opt uh other cities again and get them allied against their enemy and this is a whole scheme that's come out recently of the political alliances and misalliances that took place during the classic uh period we never could have done this 30 years ago i mean 25 years ago now we can start talking about this kind of thing now that we can read these inscriptions the whole idea of warfare was not necessarily to get territory here but rather they never had that idea but rather to get political hegemony over other people to command tribute from states that were left alone basically politically but always had the threat of an army coming in and secondly and probably even more importantly to take great captives important captives from that other city and bring them in for torture and sacrifice this is on a bone uh from a small beautifully incised bone from the tomb of hassan chan kawil the uh the king of the great king of tikal who won a great battle over kalakhmul and this is a prisoner from kalakmul on this and he is actually given his name and titles here and it says that he comes from here which is way to the north a bitter enemy so tikal eventually won but that's the main point of maya warfare okay that's the maya i'll come back to them uh later now let's move to the other side of the world and i mean it is the other side at least it is from new haven um this is uh of course a map of southeast asia and i'm not going to go into any great detail about the geography here but this is southeast asia here with the great mekong river coming down through here one of the largest river systems in the world uh and it comes down through these lowlands here and that is the center of the khmer empire right there the khmer held that uh including the delta region which is now in south vietnam and then all of this land north of the dhanrak mountains up here in the korat plateau in northeastern uh thailand plus a whole lot more that's the area that we're going to be looking at the pre-history of this place at least of cambodia is not well known although the archaeology of thailand and northeastern thailand in particular has been much better worked out than uh in this area here than in cambodia property but about the beginning of the christian era and in the first centuries of it there were very important trade contacts between india and southeast asia and contacts that also included chinese goods coming in here goods from india and even goods coming from the mediterranean crossing the melee peninsula into uh entrepreneurs trading uh trading posts uh in the coast of southeast asia or near the coast the net result of this was that in this region of southeast asia southern vietnam the delta region cambodia today thailand the melee peninsula there were a series of chieftains of local chiefs who were probably clan leaders or leaders of perhaps patrilineal clans people who spoke an ancestral form of khmer or an ancestral form of uh uh cham which is a malayo-polynesian language and who had uh been taken as their model uh for how to put a polity together india this area became indianized at this point and um there was a long time when um because of all of the uh obvious presence of indian ideas here that uh indian patriots claimed that this was actually greater india but it was no such thing these people were emulating a great civilization the great civilization of india and taking the whole idea of the god king and of the exemplary center of the hero uh uh king like uh rama in the ramayana as the model to put together something more complex than a mere chieftain and you have um during these centuries leading up to about 800 a.d you have the crystallization of some of these chiefdoms into real states built on indian lions this is not to say that indians came almost by a long shot perhaps gurus came at this point wandering monks and priests and holy men but many of these people who were gurus were probably khmer who had gone to india to learn these things and come back so it's no simple takeover and why india rather than china because the chinese model of contact is takeover the chinese imposed upon northern vietnam for instance their way their bureaucracy their people and their tribute system so that you were beholden to the chinese emperor wherever he happened to be uh this did not take place in the rest of southeast asia and they kept the chinese at arm's length except to trade so you have these these crystallizing kingdoms the chinese there are chinese reports about these kingdoms they talk about a first a a kingdom called funan down here in the delta region and along this part of cambodia and then later they talk about a a a a really important region called chennai up here in what's uh northeastern cambodia and neighboring neighboring of vietnam and these are crystallizing kingdoms there's actually architecture to go with this these are becoming urban centers with heavy training going on and all all sorts of rare materials between india china and southeast asia incidentally from down here in a site called okayo that the in the delta region that the french dug before the war before the vietnam war uh they actually found uh roman coinage uh uh coming all the way from uh italy uh there so these were really training entrepreneurs now i'd like to say something about the geography here because i've described to you the geography of the tropical lowlands of southeast asia excuse me of southeastern mesoamerica southeast asia is very similar except you've got to talk talk here about the the great river system uh it's a monsoon climate a heavy tropical forest originally over much of it but the mekong river is what really makes this whole area during the uh there are two strongly marked seasons a rainy season the so-called monsoon season and a dry season and they're exactly the same as the rainy and dry seasons in the maya area come at the same time rainy in our summer and especially in the fall and dry from winter time on until the end of may when the rains come again during the the the rainy season in the summertime the mekong is nourished by the melting snows of tibet where it begins and what happens is that this river coming down here this great river comes through all the mouths of the delta and like a a bad sewer system it backs up it cannot handle all of that water and it backs up the river's back up and back up into this lake the great lake or the tonle south in cambodia which is the largest lake in southeast asia and this lake expands to four times its dry season size at that point fish come in to breed in this region and the tonle sap has the greatest density of fish in the world it's an incredible source of protein to the people of cambodia so if you look at that environment this is encore uh it looks like the maya area it's a monsoon forest a high tropical forest however this was and is today largely cut down some of it's left because it's an important source of various raw materials and things that people need but mostly it's gone because these people are rice agriculturalists it's been left here in the the great national park that the government has at encore you can actually see a ruin there peeking through the trees it does look like the maya it looks like decal this is a map of the uh tonle sap itself and you can see how uh encore is placed here this is where you fly into encore here you stay at siem reap and this is where encore is itself it says angkor wat here let's say encore umkorn i mean city it's the it's the uh cambodian version of negara the sanskrit word negative city and it includes angkor wat as you will see later on but it's strategically located here because during the dry season when the waters recede in the tonle sap it's flooded a very large area here they plant in the receding in the mud that's left by the receding waters they plant their rice and it's a it's a bread basket it's it's like the nile uh uh it's an incredibly rich area because most of the land in cambodia is not that good away from the tonle sap or away from the river systems but here it's incredibly good and uh because of the protein here in the turnlaceof the great lake and because of the the uh receding agriculture rice agriculture receding water as rice agriculture rather this is encore is where it had to be and the whole growth of encore i think depends if you want to take economic models upon the possibilities the agricultural potential of this region now as i said there is a rainy season of the dry season this is november uh which is sort of towards the tail end of the rainy season it's raining like mad now in cambodia and it will taper off finally at the end of november and beginning of december and that's a fact almost all uh cultivation away from the great lake depends upon this this rainfall most of rice in cambodia is actually rainfall uh produced on fields that are merely watered by rain and not cultivated at all in the height of the dry season here you are looking out at the edge of the tonle sap these are all flooded rice fields here and as the water goes down they will plant then in the mud come in and plant in the mud and this will all turn into green rice it's quite a site but it's just loaded with fish and there's a huge fishing industry here fish turned into mainly turned into the most unattractive stuff to the western ears eyes and nose fish paste fermented fish paste which is a wonderful source of protein for everybody and it's part of the cambodian diet you get to like it after a while this is uh uh now a a rice field in an area that has been left by the receding waters of the uh on my soft hut i shot this one in uh november and you can see a cambodian little cambodian hamlet there all the houses in cambodia are on stilts raised up above the deck there and people live in the upper story and the pigs and other animals water buffaloes live down below which would make it very very difficult to find these things archeologically and as i say there are many kinds of rice grown in cambodia all with different by the khmer all with different growing seasons lengths of growing time and different characteristics now today of course hybrid rice produced by the big rice institute up in the philippines that's spreading uh everywhere not in some cases such a great idea now this place is big encore is huge encore covers at least 75 square miles 200 square kilometers it's i think one of the perhaps the biggest ancient archaeological site in the entire world and i'll prove it to you in a moment uh it's so big it can be seen from space it is it's one of the things that you can see from space like the great wall of china and um this is uh a an image from uh taken from from the uh shuttle and endeavour shuttle a pass that uh when they passed over uh encore uh and a project that was backed by nasa and the jet propulsion lab to shoot to make radar pictures a different uh on different bands of encore itself here's the tonle sap down here this is encore itself these are the coolant hills from which various from which all the water comes that runs down through encore to supply these huge uh artificial basins here really tremendous ones there's ankorbat this is encore tom with the royal palace there and the bayonne in the center and all sorts of other complexes around it but this thing is really enormous flying into siem reap into uh from the west from bangkok if you look out the plane you'll see this that's the western barai the western reservoir here completely artificial stone lined on the edges it's eight kilometers long which is five miles long the center of it is actually right here this has all been silted up over here and that's there's another one on the other side of encore that's almost as big and others uh elsewhere so what were these these are all rice fields here with hamlets this is an ancient site right here what were these and the idea came up early on uh the french had been here for over a hundred years uh excavating and restoring it and the idea came up from their uh investigations that these reservoirs were there because it was an irrigation civilization that the kings of encore had these things constructed by hundreds of thousands of slaves to to keep the water in so that these rice fields could all be uh irrigated that this was a prime example uh used by uh various uh mainly marxist uh historians and anthropologists to show that in eastern asia there was another kind of civilization that was a very rigidly organized kind of civilization that depended upon irrigation it turns out not to be the case there's a map of what you were looking at uh on the in the radar picture uncorbat is here that's uncortable with the royal palace and what not the center of the huge city uh here the two barai big bad eyes other ones are elsewhere there's another one down here that should be in blue also and i have put on that map of central tikal at the same scale you can barely see it uh it's postage stamp size you could put how many tea colas which mayanist love to think is the biggest thing ever made in the history of the world how many could you put within encore just to give you an idea of the size of this place now there's a difference that uh encore was the center of a great empire a unitary empire where tikal never was so one has to be fair about this but it does put things in perspective uh to the north in the coolant hills is where the uh people of encore got the stone from which they constructed or at least finished their uh all of their buildings and architecture and from which they made their sculpture and it's also the source of all the water that comes down to fill those butt eyes and that runs through the site and through all the canals that are around there this is the headwaters of the siemens river during the rainy season going over a waterfall here these coolant hills are extremely important because just to the north of encore because at in the year 802 a.d one particular king named yasho varman declared himself he was a local ruler he declared himself a universal king and he founded the city of angkor which was called yashodarapura that's the ancient name for ankur so he is the founder of it and he is the founder of the khmer empire and it becomes then you enter really something equivalent to the classic maya period at this point but in 802 i said that the models that on which they drew were india 100 from india and the indian model for building architecture for building a a royal center and a royal temple and these were royal temples uh everything you see at ankara all the great structures are royal temples they what they are doing is reproducing the himalayan mountains the home of the gods when they make these these are temple mountains and ideally there's a central mountain with five other ones around it this is a mandala this is the uh these are definitely mandalas of indian origin and you are reproducing here mount meru the great mountain of the gods where all the gods and spirits live uh in the himalayas according to hindu mythology and around it you construct a moat and the moat represents the sea that surrounds mount meru even though it's a square moat and all the rest of it that's what it is conceptually it's that so in making this into each one of these temples each king successive king made his royal temple here or in temples to his ancestors he is aligning himself with the gods in mount meru and the gods are the hindu gods shiva the most important of all the the god of destruction but also a great creator god and the god of the royal family and the royal house and of the king himself uh as seen in the form of a of a lingam um which is a stone phallus which represents the godhead and the king at the same time vishnu another very important god the preserver and brahma the creator these are the three gods of the hindu trinity there in one of the temples is a lingam sitting in the female yoni here it's been busted off but it actually goes way underground and it represents the three shiva on the top and then the other two gods further down in parts that you cannot see and these are the gods themselves uh this is this is the divine part this is the holiest part of each temple uh is is the lingam here which each successive king dedicated these are royal foundations now where is that you think it looks like tikal it's encore i frankly fell over when i saw this for the first time in 1954. uh the earliest architecture in uh encore uh this is a temple mountain actually looks uh terrifically maya and i really don't think there's any connection because the dates are wrong uh remember this can't be any earlier and isn't any earlier it's actually dates to the 10th early in the 10th century a.d the maya area is over by that time the maya were making this kind of thing long before the cambodians were so uh if there was any influence it went the other way mayas paddled their canoes across the pacific and brought it to the other side but it's remarkably similar each one of these temples has inscriptions in it um the the inscriptions uh are generally on the sides uh on the jams of the buildings of the doorways when you get to the temple on the top where the lingam is kept and what do they say some of them are in sanskrit and some of them are in khmer the sanskrit ones are of interest to the history of religion because they're entirely religious they are described the dedication of the temple to a particular god and describe the holy ancestry of that particular king and so forth and their poetry their actual sanskrit poems very beautiful ones in writing that's eventually derived from india but it's typically commercial writing but writing in sanskrit the khmer ones are much more interesting to archaeologists because they give you some economic data they tell you that each one of these temples had so many villages attached to it that had to produce through corvae labor and tribute and temple work had to produce so much each year at certain times and some of this some of these temples had uh and temple complexes had thousands of villages attached to it um with up you know thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are called which some people translate as slaves but nobody is quite sure what probably the majority of the people in the landscape of the villagers in cambodia were attached to one or another of these temples in encore and all the other provincial sites uh we know from the inscriptions which don't tell us a really a great deal that there were as much as 90 provincial capitals in the encore empire and each one of them filled with temples that had its own villages i suspect the maya were organized the same way and yet unfortunately my inscriptions don't tell us this kind of a thing they tell us other things in fact there's much more history actually in maya inscriptions than there are in khmer ones now everybody thinks it's encore vat well this is encore plot it's only part of encore but really incredibly beautiful and it's the largest religious structure in the entire world uh and was built uh in the first part of the 12th century by a great and important uh uh king as some people think his funerary temple his ashes were eventually going to be deposited in a deposit underneath or around or by the lingam that would be here but it's not dedicated to shiva which most temples are but rather to vishnu because the main entrance actually faces west here you come in from the west here it's it's again a temple mountain a quincunx with four towers around a central one and some of the most beautiful sculpture in the world occurs there here is a map of it with an enlargement of some of the galleries the great moat around it a huge huge moat i mean really everything's big this is coming in from the west and then galleries that are absolutely covered with fire reliefs these are the largest and longest barrel continuous bar reliefs in the entire world all over ankorvat are these wonderful images of apsaras who are divine beings lovely lovely women who were created during the churning of the milky sea and the first moment of creation and they live in uh in the cambodian uh heaven uh but they represent obviously the thousands of probably palace attendants and dancers that were at the the beckoning of the king and his court this is one of the corridors of uh in unkorvat the galleries where and these are all covered here this surface completely with viral leaves extraordinarily and complex and beautiful barrel leaves one of them shows the king suryavarman ii seated on his palanquin here surrounded by his court officers with umbrellas and fans and fly whisks and so forth and uh here is what he looked like there are military processions with his war elephants and all of his officers and army and then there's a whole lot of hindu mythology told in other reliefs but this man was a divine king uh he was some people think a god king he represented the god on earth in this case vishnu usually the king uh was the avatar the earthly representative of shiva the the main god of the royal pantheon well to get back to the map you have been looking at angkor wat here but the largest complex here is not angkor wat but rather angkor thom it's so big i mean you stand at one of these entrances and look across uh up this road to the center of it and it's all the way to the horizon and then you realize that's there's another part that keeps on going all the way over there a map like this can't even give you an idea the scale of this this is a part just part of the moat around the king who who was responsible for a lot of the architecture that you see was a man named jaya varman the seventh unlike uh his ancestors he was a devout buddhist but a buddhist of the mahayana sect which was much more complex and and uh much more much less austere than uh hinayana buddhism which comes in much much later and therefore incorporated the hindu gods into their mythologies and everything else all around encore tom and especially at the gates and in the center of it the bayonne as a face of what people think is lokeshwara the buddha of the future however it's the portrait most people think of jayavarman the seventh himself and they're all over the place every one of these towers has these faces looking out four faces around it here each one has four faces looking out so everywhere you go this is the very center the central complex at angkor thumb you find this face looking out at you with this enigmatic mere smile there are wonderful bar reliefs uh in the bayonne and the center of angkor thumb showing all kinds of scenes of daily life and like the maya scenes of work there in this case the khmer fighting a jungle battle with their traditional hereditary enemies the cham the cham have a long history also they are malayo-polynesian speakers who occupied large hunks of southern vietnam and part of northeastern cambodia and where as i say the hereditary enemies of encore and actually conquered encore before jayavarman the seventh took the throne and he beat them in a series of battles shown here very very graphically all sorts of scenes of daily life here we know from well let's say right now an awful lot of what we know about ancient encore is not from excavations that the archaeologists have done because they've been mainly concerned with reconstruction and making the place into a tourist site and with art history not with big anthropologically interesting questions most and therefore of what we know about their life comes from two sources one these bar reliefs on the bayonne and secondly a chinese traveler named jodagwan who was a diplomatic envoy from the yuan court the court of the mongol kings in china at that point and who came back after a year or two in encore and wrote a wonderful account of late 13th century encore it's delightful it's wonderful to read and gives and most of what people talk about is actually based upon this particularly upon joe dog one because the khmer sources don't tell you these things we know that the king had thousands of servants in the royal palace that he had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of concubines and it's a wonderful description of the royal life of the splendid riches of this man who could command these elephant armies and tons of gold pouring in at all times and the tremendous luxury in which he uh he and his court lived uh this is a scene in the bion showing uh uh probably part of the palace but uh i'll come to the palace in a moment the royal palace but that's all we know that is the royal palace in uh uh uh encore tom it's huge it's a tremendous structure i mean really big with ceremonial pools there uh this is the royal temple in which the royal family worshipped the elephant terrace is here where he went out and watched these great processions and according to joe dagwan even fireworks shows and all sorts of things over here it's barely been touched archaeologically the excavations are going on now but um just beginning there isn't even uh an archaeological sequence that's based upon dirt archaeology for encore i discovered i'm talking to all the various expeditions that are in there today there's about six different groups at encore now from all over the world there's two to three japanese ones there's there's everything but an american one unfortunately but uh they're just beginning the kind of study that went on 50 years ago in the maya area where you build up sequences through a study of pottery and things like this it's just in its infancy today so there's not much we know about the royal palace except what joe doguan tells us that's the elephant terrace that i told you about with the king's war elephants shown here in bar relief here going along here and we know from joe dog one that he and his court and his wives and everybody came out and watched these incredible spectacles that took place during the year at encore well now everything comes to a halt uh here eventually but before it does under jayavarman the seventh and the later kings encore basically conquered the rest of southeast most of southeast asia large parts of thailand they held all of this area of vietnam down here uh all the way into uh burma and then down into the melee peninsula and what is malaysia today it was a huge empire at its height reaching its height probably in the uh 11th 12th and 13th centuries but then things eventually starts to fall apart at their height there are numerous provincial capitals this is one of the most amazing of them a place called prague which until the khmer rouge decided to make peace with the government about a year or so ago you could not go to i've been there it's an incredible sight on the edge of the dangrek mountains overlooking the cambodian lowlands here and it's sort of scary to go there because you know that the people who are taking you around these ruins were khmer rouge only about two years ago now they're selling coca-cola to the tourists but transit gloria but it's a wonderful ceremonial site and there's sites like this all over cambodia and northeastern thailand and at this point i've been to an awful lot of them this is a a very important site uh in pima in in thailand today that's been beautifully restored by the thai government which has done a lot of very good archaeology um a sort of a miniature uh encore here and even in laos there's major uh encore sites this is the most important of them blackpool which is above the western bank of the uh mekong river in laos one of the palace structures here it hasn't been reconstructed at all but it's a very beautiful sight and a very ancient one the problem in studying encore is and all the theories about encore is that there's no until recently there's been no really good map of encore that's the equivalent to the maps that i've shown you of classic maya sites they've never done the on the ground survey that should be done except recently the japanese international cooperation association or jaika has made some really good maps that are almost impossible to get i'm still trying i photographed these things surreptitiously the last time i was in encore looking at the photograph of part of it uh wonderful maps uh topographic maps using aerial survey photogrammetry of encore and it's really important to do this this is encore tom the royal palace is up here this is where the bayonne was this is angkor wat this is the western bahrai the eastern barai up here and so forth now this covers a big hunk of encore just this map here in three or four colors and very very detailed it's got elevations here and what's come out of this are two things first of all uh it turns out that it's impossible that these butt eyes these great reservoirs ever could have irrigated uh the fields that past investigators like bernard felipe groglier claimed it did he claim that this was a great irrigation civilization city uh it's impossible that these things could have done this it just doesn't work out from the elevations and there's no sign that the dikes that go around this were ever breached to flood these fields in fact we know that uh from very good studies that geographers have carried out here recently well not as thorough as they might be but they've started it that basically these fields are not irrigated but rather they've got some flood retention devices and to hold the water back so that it doesn't all run out as the dry season goes on there's a lot of water coming down from the coolant hills to the north into here to fill these reservoirs so what are the reservoirs there for the reservoirs are there for ideological reasons because the the hindu religion that they followed demands reflecting pools demands these sacred oceans around and near their holy sites this thing was built for totally uneconomic reasons has nothing to do with the famous economic substructure that's supposed to be underneath everything but has to do with the ideology of kingship uh and the idea that's behind uh hindu religious uh iconography so you have to have these these moats and these huge reflecting pools here they have no practical use whatsoever and in fact this western barai before the uh cambodian wars began in recent ones the u.s government and the french government tried to reconstruct this thing and put in a system that was supposed to irrigate all the fields down in this area here and it doesn't work no cambodian in his right mind no farmer ever could grow rice from this thing and uh it doesn't work so the idea that this was an irrigation civilization is now pretty much cup put the other thing is what kind of a city is this or was this now we know what the maya cities were like from the surveys that have been done very lots of excavation done in hamlets outlying sites little village groups every kind of place has been surveyed in the maya here nothing's been done absolutely zero but on the basis of this map and if you look at the aerial photographs whole areas of this are uh in uh ancient rice fields you can see the the buns or the uh dikes around these old rice fields that are all laid out on a grid pattern here if this were a city in our sense why is it that you have huge areas in this that we're growing rice it's as though you know central park was turned into a kansas farm it doesn't honestly make any sense to me is was this really an urban city on the chinese model or the western european model or the near eastern model i don't know and i think that's all up in the air now wasn't even an urban civilization or are these holy cities with the bureaucrats and the royal family and all the traders and everybody around them but not really a city in the sense that we know it we don't know at this point well now i said this before and i'll say it again all this comes to an end there is a mighty collapse of the classic khmer civilization and encore itself that takes place at the end of the 14th and beginning of the 15th century as the thai uh come into thailand and start moving down originating in china and come down here they begin attacking uh encore and the outlying uh parts of the encore state and start defeating the encore kings at the same time the other peoples are moving down in here particularly the vietnamese and so forth taking over every other areas from these people in 1431 encore is abandoned largely not entirely but largely amongst aeon and the capital is moved down uh to this region here eventually to phnom penh where it is uh today uh the court moves down but it's in total disarray it's nothing the way it had been before uh the kings are still divine but they have extremely little power compared to their ancestors jayavarman the seventh and suryavarman the second and yasho varma the first it's a it's a pale reflection of what went on they've gone into a post-classic phase of all sorts of disruptions uh taking place at the same time the thai uh victors introduce theravada buddhism which is totally different than what the khmer rulers had been used to and totally different from the ideology of the khmer god king therapada buddhism is the kind of buddhism practice in sri lanka in its practice in thailand and a number of other countries including laos and it is in cambodia today and it is built around the meeting hall where monks who do not belong to high-ranking nobility or anything it's a highly democratic religion all need to decide the affairs of the community and this is the basis of theravada buddhism it's like it's a communal uh religion and a religion of of uh uh it's a gentle religion uh no more uh uh warrior gods like shiva going out and raising uh all kinds of cane with the with the enemy um it's a totally different ideology it does not celebrate the the royal uh uh the building of royal monuments for the royal ashes but rather puts up uh stupas that look like the old royal monuments but for ashes and relics of important buddhist saints a totally different religion comes in at this point and encore does not uh entirely disappear because the buddhist theravada buddhist monks continue to use encore what means a buddhist monastery angkor wat as a as a great temple a communal temple for these people and they're still there today when you walk through angkor wat you will come across theravada buddhist monks conducting ceremonies and they're they're they're living there today all around ankorban and have always been there the french claimed that in the uh around the end of the 1850s uh that a man named discovered encore he didn't discover encore it's never been forgotten there have always been people living there all the cambodians knew where it was and the very and the cambodian monks kept it clean and kept it cleared you could always go and visit the encore and many many visitors did even before mr museum came there so it's it's it's it's a total takeover there is phnom penh as it is today that's the royal uh palace there and the king still there still is a king and a royal house there but greatly greatly diminished he's still divine in many respects but nothing like his ancestors so what has happened here in this collapse is a total socio-political collapse of an ancient system that had an ideological basis to it we see no reason to believe that it was anything economic that resulted in this but rather the whole raison d'etre of the whole thing the god king no longer could could rule um i have a quote on this from i had a quote from a wonderful student of this subject who was an american diplomat lawrence p briggs who wrote a great book called the khmer empire which really got me going on this and he says here it's a long long sentence no amount of blows from without could account for the unfinished condition of temples and sculptures begun decades and even centuries before the fall of encore or for the systematic mutilation of the image images of the hated gods seen everywhere at encore and you do see that in short to use a crude expression the wonderful period of ancient khmer civilization ended not so much because the khmers got licked but because they got religion and this is absolutely true now let's just uh finish it off and look at the maya again oh there by the way is what happened to encore most of encore it went back to the forest there and these great jungle trees took it over it's very this is top promo a wonderfully romantic part of encore that the french archaeologists have left in its original condition the same thing happened to the maya area this is tikal artist reconstruction of it around a thousand a day a hundred and something years after the fall of the classic and all these structures are now going back to the forest with various small little groups camping out in the ruins uh here from the mu but mutilating the monuments the same way the cambodians had done at encore and no longer all of these cities now abandoned and they moved somewhere else they moved according to very bad records we have to the north into northern yucatan and possibly into guatemala at this point and at the same time just as in the cambodian case a new religion comes in uh into the maya region this is taken at chichen itza uh a religion based upon a god who had not existed before among the classic maya and that's the feathered serpent or quetzalcoatl known to the maya as kukulkan it became a single cult in which the old maya gods had really pretty much been put to one side they built a four-sided pyramid in honor of kukulkan here and this is very very late i mean this is now we're talking about after 900 a.d to about 1200 a.d when all of this here is a feathered serpent on one of their temples grim kind of architecture highly militaristic and definite evidence of outside people coming in from mexico at that point just as the thai had come into uh the uh old khmer area so an ideology uh has now the old religion is totally overturned there are no more god kings left in the maya area just as in cambodia there are no more scribes they no longer make that beautiful pottery with those wonderful scenes the scribes have all gone as far as we know very few of them left total destruction of an old way of life so what did it well uh a number of archaeologists in on both sides of the water think that these two ancient civilizations were really the destruction of them was because after six or eight hundred years and that's how long most ancient civilizations last that the people had had enough but they'd had after all when you considered that all of cambodia most of the people there were we're basically slaves of these great temple cities you can understand uh that they they they get pattern exhaustion they get tired of doing the same thing over and over again in the maya area because of the good studies we have we know that this went along with other factors it went along with environmental destruction and it went along with a collapse of the uh agricultural system the there's no evidence for this in cambodia but that's because they haven't looked uh as i say cambodia cambodian archaeology is 50 years behind that of the maya and someday uh we'll know this kind of thing so that's the story that's told by these two civilizations they run in parallel except slightly askew as far as time goes but there's so many things that can be learned and thought about and new ideas come up by comparing these two civilizations whether they were connected or not we don't know ever i don't think they actually were but they have lessons to give to each other that i think we'll all want to learn from someday thank you john yes and i was wondering where are the depletions of dancers or musicians or people making love or doing the things that people do in real life in real life now that's a good question that whole business about all the bloodletting and whatnot there was a period in maya studies about 15 years ago or so where everything was blood and the picture came up of a bunch of people who were doing nothing but sort of mutilating themselves and each other to draw blood et cetera et cetera and that's a little bit exaggerated we now know where uh but on the other hand this did occur to a certain extent just as human sacrifice did but the ordinary day-to-day life of the maya is depicted you get uh uh views of this on the classic classic maya pictorial pottery we have palace scenes you don't show on that you don't show the slobs the proletariat doesn't show on that just like they you know in most civilizations uh that kind of life is really downplayed uh you have the elite were concerned with their own life with themselves and with courtly things so a lot of that has to do with the courts and we get a lot of views of what went on in the courts marriage negotiations feasting is big now uh on classic maya pottery you see this on justin kerr's wonderful rollout classic maya pottery this kind of thing going on gift giving tribute uh this kind of thing that's what you get uh depicted there the bonom park murals which are the the the most or were now they're largely destroyed uh the the best picture into what it looked like in a classic maya site they show you warfare in one room going on uh in off in the jungle really very accurate description of this thing uh arraignment of prisoners then it shows uh preparations uh for a great celebration going on all the palace servants and so forth are there doing whatever they have to do including people who are putting all the equipment on the participants and then finally the last room shows a a great dance going on with probably the feathers from several thousand quetzal birds involved with that in their costume but the point is that the dance is a sacrificial dance there's somebody getting sacrificed and beheaded eventually uh there that's what you get for the classic maya there are no scenes uh that i know of that give you the kind of life that you find at encore in the biome release where you have people showing them fighting and gambling and stuff going on in markets and whatnot we we don't have that they were they were they were operating on a different level but we know an awful lot about courtney life from this yes please uh yes professor i have a couple about what is the ratio of size between t call and encore about how large how much larger how much larger is encore than tikal it's at least 15 times larger maybe 20. if you look at that map where i put t cal in photoshop i put it on at the same scale and it's purely this big an encore is like that i'd say at least uh the other question is you mentioned the uh the chinese scholar yeah sometimes uh yes could you could you spell that out and argue with joe well i'm going to use the old wayne giles system of transliteration c-h-o-u then t-a-k-u-a-n joe duck won i don't know what the pinyin is for it but that's uh joe duckwon and he was a diplomat chinese diplomat and it was published first in french uh in a french translation by paul pelliot but you can find it uh in bookstores in bangkok in english a little paperback it's wonderful it's really very entertaining he had a wonderful sense of humor and he loved those kevin those khmer ladies he really did it's the uh customs customs of cambodia it's a geographic the chinese when they went on these expeditions you know for trading expeditions and diplomatic ones they would get back and they'd write up an account of what they'd seen and these are very early ethnographies they're often very entertaining there's another chinese named maduan min who also uh was much much earlier who describes sort of a pre-encore life uh you know somebody could search through chinese archives and then find more of these things but there are a lot of descriptions the chinese were always interested in the barbarians the outer barbarians i mean they were really fascinated they were early anthropologists and they really liked that kind of stuff and they wrote wrote it up and joe doug we know is very very accurate everything he says is true please okay there definitely is that's right well you want you want me to let my hair down about this the i am convinced from a lot of time spent in asia and southeast asia uh i've spent as much time there as i practically have in mexico and central america that and extended stays in bali i'm convinced that there's a connection and i think that this connection is on an intellectual level and that it took place sometime in the early centuries of our era uh it would have involved such things as the transmission of bark paper books uh the technology behind bark paper books that are folding screen books uh it would have involved calendrical things such as permutation calendars the the balinese permutation calendar is practically identical to what i've described of the maya calendar it's incredible how close it is that's when i talked to a bolognese calendar priest i can predict the next thing he's going to say from what i know about the maya it's really strange uh there are color directions the idea that the the the universe is associated with the four directions but which have colors and plants and specific birds and animals associated with them that spread all over east asia southeast asia and mesoamerica a little bit up into the southwest of the united states just the eye the thing after thing after thing always on an intellectual level of course there's no horses there's no water buffaloes there's no rice there's no wheat et cetera et cetera et cetera but i think that the navigational skills of the peoples of east and southeast asia were tremendous the morning people of borneo uh in the first centuries of our era got all the way to madagascar the people in madagascar speak a language that is from borneo that's a long long long long way these were master master navigators these people and uh we know that the chinese were master navigators the southeast asians were if you go to borough maduro and look at the great boats that are in java there these huge outrigger boats that are as big as european boats of the day i think they could make it easily across it back so i think there was contact i really do but uh nobody's ever found the smoking gun that is if you could find a uh let's say a wonderful buddhist statue or a shiva in an early tomb in the maya area that would be you want to watch out though there's a lot of jokers around here like the soul excavations and drop something in surreptitiously i used to carry wrong pieces of roman glass around with me to excavations hoping to be able to drop them but i really do think someday uh i think there really is i mean the the the eclipse calendar of the han chinese which i've talked about last time like or two times ago of han dynasty china is identical to the eclipse calendar that's in the maya dresden codex that the maya had there are many ways there's a number of ways to skin that cat and it happened to be that the maya and the chinese did an alike so joseph needham who once was up here lecturing in the same series uh pointed out uh yes please a maitreya in palenque no i've never seen a maitre in palenque i'll tell you what has shown up though uh a roman a roman uh uh figurine uh a head i didn't drop it uh it showed up in a site called kalish lawaka which is near toluca in the highlands of mexico uh way uh southwest of mexico city and uh it's in a pre-columbian context uh i know the guy who found it uh was a very fine archaeologist it's underneath a sealed floor in this site which is a very late site i mean it's an aztec period but it's it's free spanish and they've recently analyzed that and it's roman they carried out chemical analyses on it there's no doubt about it it's terra cigar latte it's a it's a roman figurine how did that get there yes please yeah like uh is there any relation you think with the bay of jars i guess brazil uh are you talking about the so-called phoenician stuff there i'm not going to get into that one that gets a little that's a guy called barry fell and i i don't believe anything he says but a roman figurine isn't going to worry me because there are roman figurines that show up at okayo that site in the uh that site in the delta region of vietnam which was very early the first centuries of our era so who knows i keep my mind open about this i really do but when it comes to the big question uh is all of maya civilization or all of new world civilization transplanted from the old world the answer is n o most of it is basically a native yes well that's exactly what eric thompson said in the uh initial comments that he made on that mural well that's how you define can i answer your question that's how you define what i mean it depends on how you define warfare i think raids are part of warfare uh i mean guerrilla warfare is largely raids carried out and very highly successfully too very often that's the way the maya fought they fought the spaniards with raids actually the maya were great resistors of the spaniards they fought at night they fought in the jungle they used all kinds of modern guerrilla tactics on them and it took hundreds of years for the spaniards to really conquer the maya and in fact i knew in the east coast of yucatan i knew independent maya in the late 1940s who always had never been conquered what's why can't that be warfare i mean it's guerrilla warfare is warfare as far as i'm concerned whether you know versus a pitch battle is what you're thinking about that's another story but the aztecs for instance made a big big mistake uh in fighting a pitch battle against the the the uh you know against the spaniards which they lost that's when the spaniards moved on on the great lake and finally were able to take a tenor statement but they never should have fought a pitch battle if they'd done the way the maya did it um everybody in mexico would still be speaking nahuatly aztec language you

Channel: UC Berkeley Graduate Division

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Keywords: Coe, Hitchcock, 23337, 10/12/2000

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Published: Mon Jul 30 2012

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Coe is the Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus at Yale University. He is recognized for his work in the field of the ethnohistory of Mesoamerica, the historical archaeology of northeastern United States, and writing systems. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Mexican Society of Anthropology. Born in New York in 1929, Coe received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1959. He began his academic career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee (1958-1960), after which he joined the Yale University faculty. Coe has authored numerous world-renowned books on Mesoamerica including Breaking the Maya Code (1992). This book constitutes an informed account of one of the most exciting adventures of our age, the extraordinary breakthrough in deciphering the inscribed remains of Mayan monuments. Coe's other works include The Maya (1966), America's First Civilization: Discovering the Olmec (1968), and The True History of Chocolate (1996).