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An ancient city, hidden in the jungles of Cambodia for hundreds of years, has been revealed by aerial mapping.

Mahendraparvata is thought to have been the first capital city of the Khmer Empire, which dominated much of South-East Asia from the 9th to the 15th centuries. Cambodians have always lived in the Phnom Kulen area where the remains of the city are, but archaeologists couldn’t map it due to dense forest. In the late 20th century, the forest was occupied by the Khmer Rouge regime and its army, and even today it contains many landmines left over from conflicts.

So in 2012, Damian Evans of the French Institute of Asian Studies in Paris and his colleagues by scanning it with lasers from aeroplanes, a technique called LIDAR. The result was “a snapshot of this urban complex”. However, the picture of Mahendraparvata was incomplete, so they returned in 2015 to scan a larger area, and investigate as much as possible on the ground.

The result is “a very full and detailed interpretation of that city”, Evans says.

City in the mountains

Mahendraparvata was built on a plateau in a mountainous region called Phnom Kulen. The city spanned 40 to 50 square kilometres. Evans’s team found it was laid out in a grid, with raised embankments running roughly north-south and east-west. Within each square of the grid, there are traces of buildings, including temples and palaces.

“It shows a degree of centralised control and planning,” says Evans. Other Khmer cities from the time grew organically. “What you’re seeing at Mahendraparvata is something else. It speaks of a grand vision and a fairly elaborate plan.”

This fits with other historical sources. Inscriptions identify the first ruler of the Khmer Empire as Jayavarman II, who in AD 802 announced that he was a universal monarch and began unifying previously independent principalities. As far as we can tell, says Evans, “this king is the beginning of the Khmer Empire and this is his capital”.

“The next step is to try to date all of this,” says Miriam Stark at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. At the moment, it is unclear when many of the structures were built.

Short-lived

However, Mahendraparvata doesn’t seem to have lasted long as the capital. Instead, the heart of the Khmer Empire soon became the city of Angkor, which lay to the south on a floodplain and was the largest city in the world. The famous temples of Angkor Wat were built there 300 years later in the 12th century.

Mahendraparvata wasn’t an obvious location for a capital, says Evans. Being in the mountains, it was hard to grow enough food. The inhabitants began building a large water management system, including creating an artificial reservoir by reshaping a valley, but abandoned the attempt. Moving the capital to the floodplains made practical sense.

Nevertheless, people kept returning to Mahendraparvata,  for centuries. “The city may not have lasted for centuries, or perhaps even decades, but the cultural and religious significance of the place has lasted right up until the present day,” says Evans.

All this means Mahendraparvata was never a “lost city”, says Alison Kyra Carter of the University of Oregon.