About
30 Km north of Cambodia's greatest medieval wonder; Angkor Wat temple
and to the south of Dangrek Mountains lies an isolated chain of small
mountain plateaus of moderate height. This mountain chain, known as
Phnom Kulen, is considered as a holy mountain in Cambodia. It is of
special religious significance to Hindus and Buddhists who come to
the mountain in pilgrimage. These mountains also have great
historical significance. In the year 804 CE, Khmer King Jayavarma II
had proclaimed independence from Java from here.
The
mountain range, known as Mahendraparvat in ancient times, stretches
for about 40 km in a WNW - ESE direction. Its highest point is 487 m
and its height is quite regular, averaging 400 m all along and is
formed from reddish brown sandstone. Almost all of Cambodia's
ancient temples were built with stone quarried from this mountain
range. The Phnom Kulen mountain is always mist clad and has number of
beautiful water bodies and falls.
Many Phallic carvings from
Jayavaraman II era, representing fertility, are found just 5 cm under
the water's surface and which have special significance for Hindu's.
Over 1000 small Lingam carvings are etched into the sandstone
riverbed here. King Jayavarman II chose to bathe in the river, and
had the river diverted so that the stone bed could be carved.
Carvings include a stone representation of the Hindu god Vishnu
laying on his serpent Ananta, with his wife Lakshmi at his feet and
a lotus flower protruding from his navel bearing the god Brahma.
In
recent times, during final years of the civil war, the Khmer Rouge
used the location as a final stronghold as their regime came to an
end in 1979. They had extensively and indiscriminately mined the
entire mountainous area with landmines. This has put serious
limitation and restrictions on archaeological exploration of this
area.
During
last decade, a new powerful technology has become available to
archaeologists for remote exploration of any archaeological sites
known as LIDAR or light detection and ranging data. When Damian
Evans, director of the University of Sydney’s archaeological
research centre in Cambodia, learnt of this technology, he helped to
set up the Khmer Archaeology Lidar Consortium, made up of eight
organisations including his foundation, Cambodia's APSARA National
Authority and the University of Sydney's Robert Christie research
centre to survey the Mahendraparvat sites using LIDAR. The project
was actually a big gamble as this technology was never before used
for archaeological research in tropics. It was going to cost more
than a quarter million Dollars to implement and required close
co-operation from archaeologists from 7 countries along with
high-level approval from the government in Phnom Penh.
This
technique requires an airborne Laser scanner, that fires rapid laser
pulses at the landscape and a sensor mounted on it, measures the
amount of time for each pulse to bounce back. By repeating the
process billions of times, the instrument builds up a complex picture
of the terrain it is measuring. The project consortium commissioned
an Indonesian company, PT McElhanney to transport a Leica airborne
laser scanner to Cambodia. After the equipment reached Cambodia, a
helicopter flying at height of 800 metres in intense tropical heat,
methodically criss-crossed 370 square kilometres of remote, forested
areas of north-west Cambodia, over next seven days and collected
billions of data points and about 5000 digital aerial photographs,
enough fodder for archaeologists to keep them busy for years.
When
the images formed from LIDAR survey by using billions of laser
pulses, were examined, archaeologists observed that the images had
effectively peeled away the jungle canopy that had grown over the
ancient ruins and allowed them to see structures that were in
perfect squares. The scanner images were found completing a map of
the city, which years of painstaking ground research has been unable
to achieve. The city is being called as Mahindraparvat: quite wrongly
I feel, because Parvat in Sanskrit means a mountain and you can not
call a city as a mountain.
The
scanner images indicate that Mahindraparvat was a flourishing
medieval city about 1200 years ago with more than two dozen
previously unrecorded temples and evidence of ancient canals, dykes
and roads.
Armed
with Laser scans, the archaeologists now have began expeditions to
actually find out the sites pointed out by scan. They need to
traverse deep, rutted goat tracks and knee-deep bogs after travelling
high into the Phnom Kulen mountain on motorbikes. Everyone involved
in these expedions is sworn to secrecy until the scan findings are
scientifically peer-reviewed. So far they have found pedestals from
collapsed temples that were probably looted centuries ago, piles of
ancient bricks, two temple sites where no carved rocks or ancient
bricks could be found scattered nearby, indicating they have never
been looted and a cave with historically significant carvings that
was used by holy hermits who were common during the Angkor period.
The scan also has revealed hundreds of mysterious mounds several
metres high across the mostly buried city. Some archaeologists
believe that these could be tombs where the dead were buried.
According
to the believed Cambodian history, King Jayavarman II descended from
his mountain capital on Mahendraparvat to build another capital city
near where Angkor Wat now stands. The finding of a city on the
mountains, more or less confirms this. Scientists are now already
thinking of figuring out the reasons that must have made the king to
leave his mountain abode and come down.
18
June 2013
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